Honestly, I'd rather just rebuild this machine, but I'm not there
physically anymore and given the problems I had in installing Debian on
that Sparc machine while I was actually there, if I have those again,
when I'm now 8,000 miles away, that's going to be bad! On EVERY Sparc
system that I have tried to install Debian on, I've had random issues
and most of them have been fixed by removing/disconnecting physical
hardware, the drivers of which could have been freezing up / crashing
the system. Even the V100 I have in the lab here only worked after I
disconnected the CD-ROM drive from the system. If I have that issue with
one of the remote machines, I can't really conect/disconnect physical
hardware being 8.000 miles away :( So I need to have a way to fix this
manually if someone can help :(
Do you have the setup to net boot this system or boot from cdrom? I wouldn't even attempt the sort of open heart surgery you are gonna need without having an emergency boot fallback. Indeed rewriting the label would be best done from a standalone system so that you can test it before rebooting.
Richard
I don't have a netboot setup there but that would take only about 15-20 mins to setup. That's not the worry though. The worry like I explained is that these Sparc machines have so far been a pain to cheerfully let me install Debian on them. In each case I've had to do somersaults and cartwheels of sorts mostly involving physically disconnecting hardware components, HBAs, CD-ROM drives etc for them to get through the Installs and subsequent reboots. So even if I setup a net boot setup there from here, how would I get past these hiccups if it freezes mid-way and needs some hardware to be disconnected etc? But i do have another machine here OR I could just create a VM and then try to see what happens if I re-create the disk label and then manually build the parition table. Was rather hoping someone can give me the steps / faq/ how-to / gotchas etc before I attempt that and try to pioneer it so I can save some time and anguish :)