Re: fdisk on sunos
On Mon, 18 Jun 2001, Carlinux wrote:
> Hi, everyone. I'm a newbie in the Sparc world, and I would like to try
> some free software on it. We have an Enterprise-250 running SunOS 5.7 at
> present. Almost nobody in our department makes use of it, so I'd like to
> install a Debian Potato there. I got the three official CDs for Sparc
> (and the trhree sources), but my knowledge of Solaris is nearly
> null&void. The 'install instructions' for Debian assumes that the
> administrator has a background in Solaris [and here I am supposed to be
> the expert in Unix :-D]
>
> So, where could I find a "quickstart guide" for how to repartition with
> SunOS fdisk?
> (after that, "boot cdrom" and that's all, isn't it? ;-)
Hmm, Linux's fdisk can handle things just fine, if you're willing to kill some
Sun slices to make room for Linux. This seems to be the logical thing to
do: copy the data from a slice or two to somewhere else, change Solaris's
mounting rules not to mount the now-unecessary partitions (cursory examination
of this machine seems to indicate this is in /etc/mnttab, and yes 'mnttab' is
a man topic), and then later in the Linux install retag them as ext2 and mkfs
them...
If you don't mind killing Solaris you could just do it all w/Linux fdisk.
I'm not aware that Sun's fdisk will let you resize partitions, and I'm not at
all sure that GNU PartEd is capable of resizing Sun partitions...
After that, yes, boot cdrom. The debian/sparc install doc also has info on how
to netboot a sparc, in case you find the kernel on the cd's is unhappy for some
reason and want to try one of Ben's newer kernels.
cheers,
ari
#%@!%$ /me wishes *his* dept had a spare e250 just sitting around to play with.
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