Having the same problem Mr. Puschmann had (has?) with one of our SunFire V240 machines (sun4u) using the most recent CDROMs from Debian for "sarge" 3.1 rev 2 for Sparc -- namely, the on-CD bootloader goes off into never-never land, and nothing gets on the hard drive.
Was hoping to replace a previous installation of Solaris 10, but didn't have SILO installed. Probably need SILO, but in looking over some of the earlier comments about SILO's dependencies on Gnu compiler version, at least for 32-bit, it looks like I may be in trouble even if I could get SILO running and use a silo.conf, etc.
We've got a sizeable cluster here at the Air Force including SunBlade 2000, Opteron, nondescript Intel boxes we built, and other machines, so perhaps I should try a network boot of some kind from CD #1 on another machine. If so, could use some advice or warnings, as that (at least for me) is a complicated business!
Would it be best to boot off the CDs in the CD reader of one of the Intel machines across the LAN to one of the Sparc Machines? The SunBlade 2000 is pretty close to the SunBlade 2500, so I am reluctant to try that as net boot target. Would want to install as a dual boot on the 2000 so we don't wipe out its Solaris 10, since it is one of our head nodes.
Ronald Grisell
Brooks City Base
San Antonio, Texas, cell (210) 385-6970