This may well not be the answer you were after, but I did this (on an originally-SPARC disk, I should point out) by downloading the ISO for Solaris 6 (IIRC), burning it and running that in single-user mode. I then used Solaris's own formatting tool to get the correct format of disk - this was only necessary since I didn't have a working Linux system at the time...Another thought has just occurred to me. My Ultra 2 system has two hard drives that did not originate in a Sun system. They most likely originated in a PC. These drives were bought through eBay. They seem to work well, at least they did with Debian 3.0. It seemed to me that a Sun system requires a "Whole Disk" and/or "Magic Number". (I thing I have those terms correct.) If this is required to get this system to boot correctly how can I set this up? Sarge's partitioning program doesn't seem to have this capability. Any more thoughts? Im all ears.
I ran into a brick wall with the CD boot though, so in the end I popped the disk and got a colleague to install a basic system on it using his own Sparcstation...
Good luck fixing things! Nick