2 Oct
2015
2 Oct
'15
8:23 a.m.
Hi,
On Fri, Oct 02, 2015 at 03:17:18PM +0100, David Brownlee wrote:
On 2 October 2015 at 15:01, Eric Christopherson
<echristopherson at gmail.com> wrote:
> A very generous list member just gave me a SPARCStation 20 with SunOS
> 4.1.4 on it. I thought the first thing I would do would be to image
> its hard drive in my Linux PC, in case I ever wanted to start fresh.
>
> I assume that if I make a bitwise copy of it, I can later write those
> same bits out. But now I'm wondering what would happen if the disk
> developed marked bad sectors; would that make an exact image
> impossible to write onto it?
Years ago I contributed part of a SunOS-4 FAQ on installing SunOS "by hand"
extacting the tar files from the distribution CD. It is easy, provided
you have the files, and have a way of partitioning and extracting them onto
the destination drive, and can write the provided bootblock onto the drive.
I'll re-post that here once I find it, unless someone finds it via Google.
> I have a disc image of that release, but
unfortunately no SCSI CD-ROM.
> It occurs to me that I could perhaps make a SunOS filesystem on Linux
> and untar things from either the install CD or the image of the
> original HD into it, but I don't know if that would produce something
> actually bootable. I'm hoping there would be some way within Linux to
> capture the actual format of the filesystem to use as a skeleton.
...
> Does anyone know if this is possible (viz.
creating a valid, bootable
> filesystem and untarring files into it)? Or should I just invest in a
> CD-ROM drive?
I'd think it would be pretty easy to find a SCSI cdrom drive for next
to nothing these days. I recently discarded a large quantitiy of them.
Some drives needed to by jumpered for 512 byte sectors to boot older Suns,
but some just worked right automatically.
Mark
--
Mark G. Thomas (Mark at Misty.com), KC3DRE