Hi everyone,

Im new to Solaris and am just about to install Solaris 9 on an old Sparc based machine with Solaris 8.

My friend gave me the ISOs for V9, and now, i have them sitting on my Vista, and i have to start writing bootable CDs of the same. But Im not quite sure how to go about doing the same.

The files that i have are Solaris_9_Sparc.iso and solaris_9_Sparc_2.iso, which seem to be part 1 and part 2 on the installation aspect of it. There is another iso, MULTI_ICD_SOL_SPARC_cs.iso, 128 KB , which has the following files on it.. ADD_INSTALL_CLIENT., BOOT., MODIFY_INSTALL_SERVER., COPYRIGHT., RM_INSTALL_CLIENT., _VOLUME.inf

Now i tried burning the CDs the conventional way(3, one for each ISO) using PowerISO, Disk Creator and MagicISO, and tried to give a 'boot cdrom' and it says something of the order of

'The CD loaded does not appear to be executable'

Is there something I'm missing here?

Alternatively I would be really grateful if someone points out to me exactly how to burn installation disks from ISOs.

I could really use some help!

Thank you,
AG

Make sure that the machine and the CDs are actually for SPARC.

Define "the conventional way". You have to burn the iso image to the disk, not put the iso file on the disk like you're backing up files. It's generally a different option in your CD burning program.

Hi AlucardZero, Thank you for writing in.

I did burn the image to the disk, as in, when i mounted it back on, the files within the OSI were on it

Okie.. Conventional Way: I opened the ISO on powerIso, and well, clicked burn. I'm missing something, aren't I!!

The cd rom is 'opening' on a windows, and getting mounted onto the solaris 8, but then, i cant seem to boot off it - throws the following error -
ok boot cdrom
Boot device: /@pci@1f, 4000/scsi@3/disk@6,0:f File and args;
short Disk Read
The file just loaded does not appear to be executable

I think it has something to do with burning the Cd as a bootable...
I used powerIso to burn another copy, this time, after opening the iso, i did a action-> boot-> add boot information, selected "all files" and linked to the third OSI i was talking about. i used the burnt Cd..The error changed

{0} ok boot cdrom
Boot device....
Bad magic number in disk label
Can't open disk label package

Can't open boot device

Please, what am i doing wrong? I appreciate your help.

AG

It might be a media issue. Make sure your CD is compatible with the old sparc drive. I remember failing to boot on recorded CD-RW while CD-R were ok. Recording speed might also matter.

I have seen this quite a few times on SPARC systems and it could be many things.

If you are using poweriso you should not have to add boot information with the iso's, Solaris 9 iso's are already bootable and poweriso is smart enough to know that, so that is not your problem, you did it right the first time - just burn it.

First thing I would try is like jlliagre said, try a different CD-R (make sure it is a CD-R not CD+R,CD-RW or CD+RW)), if you have some older ones try those first, I have had just burning it on a different brand work before.

Also it could be the .iso's - I have had certain ones somehow get corrupted or just not work, hopefully not because getting your hands on some different ones could be difficult, a bittorrent tracker is your best bet,

It could just be that the cdrom drive is messed up - if this is the case you start having to get into more advanced things like doing a jumpstart or what I call a manual install....for this you need another machine that can share the iso with nfs....but hopefully thats not what it is.

Good luck! You have to love those old SPARC machines

Hi ADxD, thank you for writing in.
It was a combination of these things actually. I figured I might need to burn the CDs multiple times, just to narrow down on what exactly works and so using CD-RW seemed a good idea.
I managed to get fresh installation ISOs from torrents, and used a CD-R this time( I burnt it on 4x!!). I managed to get it to boot off the CD.
Thankfully I didn't need jumpstart or other network mechanisms, but then, hope to learn it soon

Thank you for your help! Thank you jlliagre!
AG