Re: Manually creating a Debian boot sector Or a bootable Debian disk in Solaris for x86

["A E [Gmail]" <all.eforums@gmail.com>]

On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 3:44 AM, Joseph Lenox <lenox.joseph@gmail.com> wrote:

I've done some work with Solaris 10, trying to get rid of it for most of my workstations. I was unaware there was even a solaris 8 x86 install (I'd change the Solaris install to 10 as a matter of principle -- ZFS is that good).

Use the "format" command in Solaris to change the partition layout. You should be able to resize without much issue. There is a manpage for it. You'll also need to set the partition you create as bootable.

As for the rest of it, you should probably install GRUB onto the second HDD, and chainload into Solaris (if you can do that in BIOS), as GRUB wasn't used in Solaris 8 x86 (started getting used in 10 1/06).

I'd probably tarball a working Debian system's files and extract it into the secondary partition (created above... make sure support for whatever FS you format it to is compiled-in), then configure a custom-compiled GRUB to boot it. You'll have to do that by hand (see linuxfromscratch.org for some help).

But seriously, if you can go to Solaris 10, do so. S10 x86 is a heck of a lot easier to deal with, as it includes GRUB as its boot method. If you can grok Solaris 8 x86's bootloader config and get it to boot Linux, good luck.

--Joseph Lenox

Hi Joseph,

Thanks for the response. Unfortunately, I can't really do anything with the existing system as it's ironclad locked down installation and doesn't give me much chances/options where I (with my limited knowledge of Solaris and Debian) can trick it into upgrading it to Solaris 10 or even boot anything else or from anywhere else. I mucked around with the boot params via eeprom and also through the boot interpreter going through the Solaris Configuration assistant and all, but it still always boots into the version that was installed by the vendor. So my only option is to explore your suggestions of installing linux from scratch on the 2nd hard drive and then see if I can boot into it. Although when I was in the Solaris Configuration Assistant options and selected the 2nd disk to boot from (while nothing was on it) it said something like "no solaris image found on the disk" or something like that. So I'm afraid that even if I manually try to install Debian on the 2nd disk and choose that as my disk to boot from in this configuration assistant, it might realise that it's not a solaris image and still not boot :( But regardless, I still want to give it a shot if I can find the proper procedure on unpacking initrd.gz, vmlinuz and boot.img.gz etc files onto a hard drive and create a minimal bootable debian disk. 

I found a few things on the net regarding creating bootable debian USB thumb drives etc, I might have to follow that procedure and then tweak it as I go to make it work for me.