Sun CD-ROM FAQ: Miscellaneous

Can I make a bootable tape from a CD?

There has not been a procedure reported for making SunOS 5.x bootable tapes, so this information only applies to SunOS 4.x. I suspect the usefulness of a bootable tape is declining considering most new Suns come with a CD-ROM drive and bootable media. Even for the older Sun4c machines capable of running SunOS 5.x, a compatible CD-ROM drive is now very easy to locate.

For SunOS, yes. Sun no longer offers SunOS on tape, but clone manufacturers do [courtesy Carl Mueller]. If you do not have a tape drive attached to your system, you can either use one of these clone tapes, set up another machine as a boot server or install on another machine and move the disk. If none of these options appeals to you and you have access to a CD that you can mount but from which you cannot boot, you can make your own boot tapes:

Select the appropriate MUNIX file for your KARCH:

karch	file	CDROM partition
sun4	MUNIX-sun4-4.1.3	1
sun4c	MUNIX-sun4c-4.1.3	2
sun4m	MUNIX-sun4m-4.1.3	3

The only way I know to copy MUNIX off of CDROM is using SunOS 5.x (Solaris 2.x). If some clever person knows how to do this using SunOS 4.1.x, I would like to hear from you.

Note: The 4.1.3 CDROM MUNIX differs from the 4.1.1 QIC MUNIX in that the CDROM MUNIX has the MUNIX kernel and the MUNIX filesystem combined together. In other words, you no longer need to load the MUNIX filesystem after booting the MUNIX kernel.

Mount your CDROM and select the appropriate miniroot for your KARCH:

karch	file
sun4	/cdrom/export/exec/kvm/sun4_sunos_4_1_3/miniroot_sun4
sun4c	/cdrom/export/exec/kvm/sun4c_sunos_4_1_3/miniroot_sun4c
sun4m	/cdrom/export/exec/kvm/sun4m_sunos_4_1_3/miniroot_sun4m

Build your QIC-150 tape as follows:

        mt -f /dev/nrst0 rew
        dd if=MUNIX    of=/dev/nrst0 bs=8k conv=sync
        dd if=miniroot of=/dev/nrst0 bs=100k conv=sync

You may also want to dump a copy of your "/" and "/usr" filesystems to the end of tape as once booted you won't be able to run SunInstall (for obvious reasons).

The procedure to boot MUNIX from tape is as follows:

        Press L1-A (i.e. STOP-A) to enter console mode and type:
        ok> boot tape
        
        Make the following selection when asked:
        2 - exit to single user shell

        Format and/or partition your disk if necessary.

        Copy miniroot to disk:
        (You have to do this step manually, as the automated procedure
         will attempt to copy it from CDROM.)
        # mt -f /dev/rst0 rew
        # mt -f /dev/nrst0 fsf 1
        # dd if=/dev/nrst0 of=/dev/rsd0b bs=100k conv=sync

The procedure to boot the just loaded miniroot is as follows:

        Press L1-A (i.e. STOP-A) to enter console mode and type:
        ok> boot disk:b -sw

        Once miniroot is booted you can then restore your "/" and "/usr"
        partitions from tape, etc. "

[Information courtesy of markb@elen.utah.edu]

Can I make a bootable CD?

We finally have a procedure for creating a bootable SPARC/Linux CD-ROM!

Until just recently, creating a bootable CD-ROM on SPARC was a mystery (even though the RedHat people have had a Sun bootable RedHat distribution available for quite some time now).

See "docs/CDROM.HOWTO" in "silo-0.8.4.tgz" at "ftp://sunsite.mff.cuni.cz/OS/Linux/Sparc/local/silo/".

To quote submitter Michael Leslie: "It describes in painstaking detail how to make your very own Sparc-Bootable Linux CD!

Special thanks to Michael Leslie for tracking this information down.