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From: Ryan 'ski on 11 May 2010 00:07
Hi all.

I have an E450 with a broken DVD -- apparently reads CD-ROM's OK, but
I don't know if there are still CD-ROM images from the most current
Solaris and I'm basically unwilling to do such an awful install
anyway. Looking around for a way to use LiveUpgrade to do a fresh
install, I've found that pfinstall can be tricked into running an
install in an alternate location from a running system. I got it to do
the work of installing all of the packages (required copying
"transfer_list" from the media to /etc/transfer_list), but it blows up
at the end when it's attempting to generate /etc/vfstab and a few
other things. Does anyone who's used this trick before (and someone
must have, because that's how I tripped over the idea) know what the
caveats are and how to get it to work? I wish I could watch a complete
pfinstall work to see what sort of actions it does, rather than
running complete installs over and over and fixing the problems one by
one. Does anyone have any advice?

PS: I've found since that one way to install Solaris with only a CD-
ROM but still install from a DVD image would be to start the install,
break out, and continue with a DVD image mounted. That would work, but
I'm now interested in adding the pfinstall tool to my belt, and am
more interested in the answer than actually getting a machine
installed. :)
From: Roland Titze on 11 May 2010 02:19
On 11 Mai, 06:07, "Ryan 'ski" <rnovosiel...(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi all.
>
> I have an E450 with a broken DVD -- apparently reads CD-ROM's OK, but
> I don't know if there are still CD-ROM images from the most current
> Solaris and I'm basically unwilling to do such an awful install
> anyway. Looking around for a way to use LiveUpgrade to do a fresh
> install, I've found that pfinstall can be tricked into running an
> install in an alternate location from a running system. I got it to do
> the work of installing all of the packages (required copying
> "transfer_list" from the media to /etc/transfer_list), but it blows up
> at the end when it's attempting to generate /etc/vfstab and a few
> other things. Does anyone who's used this trick before (and someone
> must have, because that's how I tripped over the idea) know what the
> caveats are and how to get it to work? I wish I could watch a complete
> pfinstall work to see what sort of actions it does, rather than
> running complete installs over and over and fixing the problems one by
> one. Does anyone have any advice?
>
> PS: I've found since that one way to install Solaris with only a CD-
> ROM but still install from a DVD image would be to start the install,
> break out, and continue with a DVD image mounted. That would work, but
> I'm now interested in adding the pfinstall tool to my belt, and am
> more interested in the answer than actually getting a machine
> installed. :)

If you have a second Sun host with a DVD drive available then you
can setup a JumpStart boot/install server. Afterwards you have to
connect both hosts via network and you can simlply install your E450
using the command "boot net - install".

See http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/817-5506?l=en

for further details.

HTH
--
Roland
From: Andrew Gabriel on 11 May 2010 03:08
In article <d3b4acc4-ab5b-42f9-bb46-357fea702198(a)e2g2000yqn.googlegroups.com>,
"Ryan 'ski" <rnovosielski(a)gmail.com> writes:
> Hi all.
>
> I have an E450 with a broken DVD -- apparently reads CD-ROM's OK, but
> I don't know if there are still CD-ROM images from the most current
> Solaris and I'm basically unwilling to do such an awful install
> anyway. Looking around for a way to use LiveUpgrade to do a fresh
> install, I've found that pfinstall can be tricked into running an
> install in an alternate location from a running system. I got it to do
> the work of installing all of the packages (required copying
> "transfer_list" from the media to /etc/transfer_list), but it blows up
> at the end when it's attempting to generate /etc/vfstab and a few
> other things. Does anyone who's used this trick before (and someone
> must have, because that's how I tripped over the idea) know what the
> caveats are and how to get it to work? I wish I could watch a complete
> pfinstall work to see what sort of actions it does, rather than
> running complete installs over and over and fixing the problems one by
> one. Does anyone have any advice?

I used to use pfinstall directly to do live upgrades before Live
Upgrade existed. It is very powerful, but unfortunately most of it
is not supported for direct use, and not documented. One thing you
might find useful is the -x option followed by a number 1-10 to
set a debug logging level.

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]
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