I have two Ultra 60's that I am putting some SCSI drives from a n old server in, 2 of them are Seagate cheeta's and the other two are Fujitsu's. I have tried everyway I can find on the internet to wipe the hard drives so that I can install solaris 10 on them, but no luck, I keep getting a bad magic number, bad label (something like that) error. I have put these into a Windows server and low level formatted them and then done a boot cdrom -s and run the format command, it still shows the original partitions on it. When I try to clear the partitions and write them to the drive it gives me a permissions error. I also tried out the dd command sequence that I found somewhere and that also does not work. Could someone give me a hand here with this, it is very frustrating. I just want to wipe these hard drives clean and start from scratch with the Ultra 60's.

BTW, the whole purpose of this torture is so that I can setup a few sparc machines for my students, I teach computer network technology and one of the class in the program is a Unix class. I am presently teaching it using several distro's of Linux (CentOS, Ubuntu (desktop), Fedora Core 5, Debian 3.1, and OpenSUSE), but would also like to include Solaris in the mix, so that they can get a feel for a real Unix OS (I am also trying to hunt up an AS400 to run AIX and an HP machine to run HP-UX so they can see those as well).

Thanks for any help that you can provide.

Scott Adams
Lead Computer Network Technology Instructor
Southeast Arkansas College
Pine Bluff, Arkansas

I understand its quite late to ask, but why did you try to wipe the disks in the first place ?
What was on these disks before ?
How much RAM is installed on the U60s ?
That make sense, Windows and Linux for that matter partitioning has nothing to do with OpenBoot SPARC disk labeling.
Can you tell the precise commands and error messages you got ?
Same question as above.

The whole story, I received 2 Ultra 60's and 4 Ultra 10's that were donated to the school for us to use. The only problem is there was no memory, HDD, or video cards (in the Ultra 60's). I have since gotten enough memory for them to run, 256M for the Ultra 10's and 1G and 1.5G for the Ultra 60's, I also got vga video cards for the Ultra 60's. I had several HDD laying around, both IDE and SCSI, so thought I would just use what I have. I loaded the Ultra 10's up with 40G drives and installed Solaris 10 no problem. I was going to use 4 36G drives that I had pulled from an old server we have in a lab here, I left one HDD and we use it as a Windows 2K server. When I put these HDD into the Ultra 60's it shows that it sees the drives in OpenBoot, but when I do a >boot cdrom - nowin (I do not have a mouse that is compatible with the Ultra 60 at this time) it runs fine until it get to the part that actually tries to do the install then I get a Hardware Failure and a failed install, I do get a bad magic number, "something" label error when the OpenBoot first comes up. I looked this up and tried all the answers that I can find with no luck:

>boot cdrom -s and then format then change the partition tables, when I do this it gives me an error to do with VTOC and says no backup label label write failed (something like that)

Tried the dd blah blah command (the one that writes zero to the actual dev location of the HDD, no luck

Tried format>analyze>purge no luck



Not sure what else to do, I have worked with Solaris on an x86 box before but never on a Sparc machine.

BTW these machines are in another room so I will have to run stuff, write it down and then put it here, but I am willing to do this if it will get these machines up.

Thanks for the help

Scott Adams

I have gotten it to boot from the cdrom drive and start the install, seems to work, but not sure what I did.

Well tried to install a pioneer dvd-304s into the ultra 60's to see if I could use the dvd-rom of Solaris 10 I created, it works in the dvd drives I installed in the Ultra 10's. It keeps giving me a ZFS error, I did not get the whole thing it is quite long (I will post it here if it will help with this). Is this just a hardware compatibility issue or am I not doing something right to get this to work?

Scott Adams

"Blah Blah" or "Something like that" doesn't help investigating the issue.

I'm confused by your ZFS related error message too.

Anyway, I would try booting on a Solaris 9 CD and formatting your disks from there.

One of my students figured this one out, he asked me what speed I burned to DVD at and I said 16x, speed of the disks, then had to do a "Duh!!!, the DVD drive is 10x you idiot." so I think I have figured this error out. I will post here to let ya'll know if a slower speed DVD fixes the problem.

Sorry about that.

Scott Adams

I don't think your issue is related to recording speed.

Can you post the real commands and error messages you got ?

I suggested also to try Solaris 9 format command, as you may be hit by a Solaris 10 issue.

I reburned the DVD at 4x speed and when I put it in the drive it again gave me the page long error message, but it did the install fine so apparently it was not a big deal after all. The install has finished and Solaris 10 is running fine on the Ultra 60.

Glad to know you succeeded