2 Oct
2015
2 Oct
'15
7:01 a.m.
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?
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?
--
Eric Christopherson
2 Oct
2 Oct
7:17 a.m.
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?
The SCSI drives will transparently map out bad sectors, presenting a
apparently defect free disk (except while a sector as actually failing
:) so the image should be fine to any SCSI drive of that size or
larger (or an sd2scsi type device)
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?
You can netboot SunOS on a sparc, which certainly used to be possible
under Linux, using files from the CD (IIRC)
In extremis you could always netboot NetBSD on it and use that to
setup the disk, but you *should* be able to do it all from a Linux
server, modulus some possible annoyances getting a rarpd and
bootparamd to build on recent Linux :)
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
9:39 a.m.
On Fri, Oct 2, 2015 at 9:17 AM, David Brownlee <abs at absd.org> wrote:
Oh, I hadn't thought that far. Sounds feasible. (I guess I could get a
CD-ROM as the other respondent said, but I don't see that I'd have any
other use for it, so even if it's cheap I don't feel like I *need*
it.)
Also, you're the first person I've seen to use the *nominative* of
modulus as a preposition :)
--
Eric Christopherson
On 2 October 2015 at 15:01, Eric Christopherson
<echristopherson at gmail.com> wrote:
Well, I guess what I'm wondering is: if the SCSI controller or the
disk's PCB exposes an interface to the disk that makes it appear
defect-free, what happens when an OS tries to write to sectors that
actually have defects? I guess this is a good question for any sort of
hard disk, not just vintage or Sun ones. My understanding was that
yes, this was mostly transparent, but that at minimum the number of
usable sectors reported to the OS would go down as sectors get marked
bad.
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?
The SCSI drives will transparently map out bad sectors, presenting a
apparently defect free disk (except while a sector as actually failing
:) so the image should be fine to any SCSI drive of that size or
larger (or an sd2scsi type device) 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?
You can netboot SunOS on a sparc, which certainly used to be possible
under Linux, using files from the CD (IIRC)
In extremis you could always netboot NetBSD on it and use that to
setup the disk, but you *should* be able to do it all from a Linux
server, modulus some possible annoyances getting a rarpd and
bootparamd to build on recent Linux :) 
27 Dec
27 Dec
7:35 p.m.
On Fri, 2 Oct 2015, Eric Christopherson wrote:
SCSI disks are most often shipped formatted with a pool of spare sectors
available beyond the nominal externally visible capacity, although the
firmware of many allows reformatting with the size of the pool altered, at
the most extreme to zero. The pool is often partitioned into concentric
zones, called "notches" in SCSI-speak, with a different number of spares
assigned per notch (the number of regular data sectors per track will also
vary between notches then), although not all firmware exposes notches to
interfacing software, and some firmware may not allow reformatting at all.
Other than as parameters for the SCSI format command and statistics these
spare sectors are invisible to software and are allocated to replace
sectors at failed medium spots transparently, although often at a
performance cost, because of the out-of-place location of reallocated
sectors incurring an additional seek or rotational delay in linear access.
Reformatting a drive that has reallocated sectors present will normally
reduce the cost or remove it altogether as logical sector positions are
reassigned in a linear manner with bad spots already taken into account
(skipped over).
When reallocation fails because of the pool of spares having exhausted,
the originating SCSI command will return a hard failure. The same will
happen when a medium error happens and reallocation has been disabled.
There are two control bits which control reallocation, ARRE and AWRE,
which enable sector reallocation on reads and writes respectively.
In the former case reallocation is only made when a medium error is
benign enough for error correction (if implemented) to be able to recover
data actually read; firmware will usually retry a read a number of times
before it gives up and returns a hard error. I have actually seen such
retries to succeed sometimes, at which point reallocation prevented
further issues at the particular logical sector.
In the latter case reallocation is always made for writes to sectors
previously observed as bad and not reallocated in a read. Which is why
wiping out a disk which previously returned read errors will normally fix
it from the logical point of view, without the need to reformat it.
When the pool of spare sectors has been exhausted, the only way to revive
a failing disk is to reformat it with its externally visible capacity
reduced, as long as the firmware permits it. Marking blocks as bad at the
filesystem level would be the distant second choice here, as the presence
of bad (unrelocated) sectors often hurts read prefetches very badly.
The acronyms stand for Automatic Read (Write) Reallocation Enable BTW.
I hope this clarifies the matters here a bit.
Maciej
The SCSI
drives will transparently map out bad sectors, presenting a
apparently defect free disk (except while a sector as actually failing
:) so the image should be fine to any SCSI drive of that size or
larger (or an sd2scsi type device)
Well, I guess what I'm wondering is: if the SCSI controller or the
disk's PCB exposes an interface to the disk that makes it appear
defect-free, what happens when an OS tries to write to sectors that
actually have defects? I guess this is a good question for any sort of
hard disk, not just vintage or Sun ones. My understanding was that
yes, this was mostly transparent, but that at minimum the number of
usable sectors reported to the OS would go down as sectors get marked
bad.
29 Dec
29 Dec
6:53 a.m.
On Dec 27, 2015 10:35 PM, "Maciej W. Rozycki" <macro at linux-mips.org>
wrote:
SCSI disks are most often shipped formatted with a
pool of spare sectors
available beyond the nominal externally visible capacity, although the
firmware of many allows reformatting with the size of the pool altered, at
the most extreme to zero.
[snip]
I hope this clarifies the matters here a bit.
Quite a lot. Thank you!
2 Oct
2 Oct
8:59 a.m.
So, lets say you have your disk already partitioned the way you want it, and you have a
swap (partition c) partition of equal or greater size of your install iso (actually not
very likely, but lets just say that's so).
You can create a filesystem on partition c from another machine, put your CD image onto
that partition, then from the OK prompt, tell it to boot from partition c of that drive.
The CD will boot, and then you can install from there - assuming that the installer gets
everything off the partition before it decides to setup swap.
*Disclaimer: I've never tried this with SunOS, because A) I had the cd and CDROM[1],
and B) I never had a swap partition that was 10x my max installed ram, however, I have
done an OpenBSD install on a sun4u arch by this same methodology, copying the minimalist
installer image to the c partition, booting from it, and then when it needed packages, it
pulled the packages from the network.
[1] FYI, in case you're not aware, SPARC machines require a CDROM that will do the
less common 512-byte sector size. This means, if your CDROM works on anything other than
a Sun machine, it won't work on a Sun machine. If it does work on a Sun machine, it
won't work on any(most) other machines. There are many SCSI CDROM drives that can
easily be changed over, either by jumper blocks or by cutting or soldering solder-pad
jumpers. For instance, back in my SunOS4 days, I had a Toshiba CDROM external that was
intended to be used by a PC. Open it up, cut a "half moon" solder jumper, and
voila, it worked perfectly with a Sun.
cheers,
dj
Eric Christopherson(echristopherson) 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?
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?
--
Eric Christopherson
11:29 a.m.
So, lets say you have your disk already partitioned
the way you want it, and$
(In passing: please don't use paragraph-length lines.)
It's been a while, but I'm fairly sure 4.1.x swapped onto b, with c
being the whole-disk partition. (That's on disks. CDs are a
completely different kettle of fish.)
/~\ The ASCII Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org
/ \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
12:51 p.m.
Correct, b, not c... c is whole disk. My bad.
Sorry about line length, I don't use HTML email, and expect the far end to
wordwrap appropriate to the terminal width. ;)
cheers,
dj
Mouse(mouse) wrote:
So, lets say
you have your disk already partitioned the way you want it, and$
(In passing: please don't use paragraph-length lines.)
It's been a while, but I'm fairly sure 4.1.x swapped onto b, with c
being the whole-disk partition. (That's on disks. CDs are a
completely different kettle of fish.)
/~\ The ASCII Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org
/ \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
4:11 p.m.
Sorry about line length, I don't use HTML email,
and expect the far
end to wordwrap appropriate to the terminal width. ;)
Then it would probably be a good idea to mark your text as rewrappable;
without that, the receiver's UA has no way to know whether line breaks
are significant or not.
See RFC 3676 for how to apply such markings to your mail - and for a
brief discussion of some of the issues involved.
/~\ The ASCII Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org
/ \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
5:05 p.m.
No problem here; OE wrapped to the size of the
window.
m
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mouse" <mouse at Rodents-Montreal.ORG>
To: <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Friday, October 02, 2015 7:11 PM
Subject: Re: Reinstalling SunOS 4.1.4 without CD
drive
Sorry about
line length, I don't use HTML
email, and expect the far
end to wordwrap appropriate to the terminal
width. ;)
Then it would probably be a good idea to mark
your text as rewrappable;
without that, the receiver's UA has no way to
know whether line breaks
are significant or not.
See RFC 3676 for how to apply such markings to
your mail - and for a
brief discussion of some of the issues involved.
/~\ The ASCII Mouse
\ / Ribbon Campaign
X Against HTML mouse at rodents-montreal.org
/ \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1
31 3E E8 B3 27 4B 
3 Oct
3 Oct
8:42 a.m.
On 3 October 2015 at 02:05, Mike Stein <mhs.stein at gmail.com> wrote:
No problem here; OE wrapped to the size of the window.
Please don't top-quote.
And: seriously? You're still using Outlook Express?! Do you /want/ to
be 0wned or something?!
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ? GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ? Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829 053 (?R)
9:02 a.m.
<Rolling eyes>
----- Original Message -----
From: "Liam Proven" <lproven at gmail.com>
To: "General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic
Posts" <cctalk at classiccmp.org>
Sent: Saturday, October 03, 2015 11:42 AM
Subject: Re: Reinstalling SunOS 4.1.4 without CD
drive
On 3 October 2015 at 02:05, Mike Stein
<mhs.stein at gmail.com> wrote:
No problem here; OE wrapped to the size of the
window.
Please don't top-quote.
And: seriously? You're still using Outlook
Express?! Do you /want/ to
be 0wned or something?!
--
Liam Proven ? Profile:
http://lproven.livejournal.com/profile
Email: lproven at cix.co.uk ?
GMail/G+/Twitter/Flickr/Facebook: lproven
MSN: lproven at hotmail.com ?
Skype/AIM/Yahoo/LinkedIn: liamproven
Cell/Mobiles: +44 7939-087884 (UK) ? +420 702 829
053 (?R)
6:22 p.m.
On Sat, Oct 03, 2015, Liam Proven wrote:
On 3 October 2015 at 02:05, Mike Stein <mhs.stein
at gmail.com> wrote:
Yeah, there's classic computing and then there's... whatever THAT is.
*g*
--
Eric Christopherson
No problem here; OE wrapped to the size of the
window.
Please don't top-quote.
And: seriously? You're still using Outlook Express?! Do you /want/ to
be 0wned or something?!
3042
days inactive
3130
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13 comments
8 participants
participants (8)
-
abs＠absd.org -
ccmp＠impakt.net -
echristopherson＠gmail.com -
lproven＠gmail.com -
macro＠linux-mips.org -
Mark＠Misty.com -
mhs.stein＠gmail.com -
mouse＠Rodents-Montreal.ORG