The Good, the Blog & the Ugly - Tim Cook's Weblog

Installing Solaris from a USB Disk

I regularly do a full install of a Solaris Development release onto my laptop. Why full? Well, that is another story for another day, but it is not because the Solaris Upgrade software; including Live Upgrade; is lacking.

I decided I no longer see the sense of burning a DVD to do this; and I know that Solaris can boot from a USB device.

I used James C. Liu's blog as an inspiration, but the following is what I have found worked well to boot an install image located on a USB disk. You may also be interested in the Solaris Ready USB FAQ.

NOTE: This procedure only has a chance of working if you have a version of Solaris 10 or later that uses GRUB and has a USB driver that works with your drive.

1. Set up an 8GB "Solaris2" partition on the USB drive using fdisk. Make it the active partition.
2. Set up a UFS slice using all but the first cylinder of that 8GB as slice 0 using format. Run newfs. Mount.

   The first cylinder ends up being dedicated to a "boot" slice. I do not know what it is used for, perhaps avoidance of overwriting PC-style partition table & boot program.

3. Mount the DVD ISO using lofiadm/mount (hint: google lofiadm solaris iso)
4. Use cpio to copy the contents of the DVD ISO into the UFS partition on the USB drive, e.g:

   # cd <rootdir of DVD ISO>
   # find . | cpio -pdum <rootdir of USB filesystem>
   

5. Run installgrub to install the stage1 & stage2 files from the DVD ISO onto the USB drive If the filesystem on your USB drive has mounted as /dev/dsk/c2t0d0s0 for example, then use:

   # cd <rootdir of DVD ISO>
   # /sbin/installgrub boot/grub/stage1 boot/grub/stage2 /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0s0
   

6. Boot off the USB disk. It uses the same GRUB install that would be on a DVD.
7. Now, I can not remember whether the next step was either:
   • Wait for the install to fail (unable to find distribution), or:

   • Exit/quit out of installation

   ...but you need to get to a shell.

8. Manually mount the USB partition at /cdrom

   NOTE: your controller numbers are probably not as you expect at this point, so double-check what you are mounting.

9. Re-start the install

   I used "suninstall". I think you can use "solaris-install" instead.

The install seemed to run fine from there, however it went through a sysconfig stage after the reboot.

Then I ended up with one teeny problem - my X server would not start.

I discovered some issues with fonts, and then decided to check the install log. I discovered a number of packages had reported status like:

Installation of <SUNWxwfnt> partially failed.
19997 blocks
pkgadd: ERROR: class action script did not complete successfully

Installation of <SUNWxwcft> partially failed.

Installation of <SUNW5xmft> partially failed.

Installation of <SUNW5ttf> partially failed.

Installation of <SUNWolrte> partially failed.

Installation of <SUNWhttf> partially failed.

I have since pkgrm/pkadd-ed these packages (using -R while running the laptop on an older release with the new boot environment mounted), and all is now well.

Posted at 07:26PM Sep 06, 2008 by timc in Sun  |