Installing Solaris 10 on a Sun Blade 2500 Silver

installationsolaris-10sparcsun

I recently bought a used Sun Blade 2500 Silver. The system has been completly wiped, so I get an OpenBoot prompt when I boot.

When I look on Oracle's compatibility page, I can see the station is able to run Solaris 10 8/11. So I downloaded the OS from the Oracle website.

According to the documentation I found, to install Solaris 10 from OpenBoot should be quite easy: put the DVD in the player, enter boot cdrom and then follow the instruction on screen.

Problem is, when I enter boot cdrom, I get the following message:

read failed

Evaluating:
The file just loaded does not appear to be executable.

I checked the DVD-ROM is able to read DVD-R. It is. And now, I have no further idea. Any clue?

Best Answer

As the the comments demonstrate, the SB2500 has issues reading the DVD. Usual causes are either in the recording side, some DVD recording applications cannot refrain to modify the iso they record, the media, or the server side, for example dvd recorded at too high a speed for the drive to properly read it.

Often, using a CD recorded, especially at a lower speed, instead of a DVD allows booting which is what you experienced with the livecd.

Unfortunately, there are no more Solaris 10 CD distributions available so the alternative would be a network boot. This would require another Solaris server running which I'm afraid is a catch22 situation in your case ...

Related Solutions

Sun Sparc – Fix ‘Inserted Disabled’ Error While Upgrading T5120 Memory

Perhaps this link can help you clarify what kind of error is occurring. http://docs.sun.com/source/820-4445-10/chapter1.html

The document referenced above appears to be here now

Sun Solaris – Find out number of processors and cores

The command psrinfo -pv is the command you are looking for. It gives you the number of physical cpus plus the count of virtual processor per physical processor.

For example on a V880 it looks like this:

The physical processor has 1 virtual processor (0)
  UltraSPARC-III+ (portid 0 impl 0x15 ver 0x23 clock 900 MHz)
The physical processor has 1 virtual processor (1)
  UltraSPARC-III+ (portid 1 impl 0x15 ver 0x23 clock 900 MHz)
The physical processor has 1 virtual processor (2)
  UltraSPARC-III+ (portid 2 impl 0x15 ver 0x23 clock 900 MHz)
The physical processor has 1 virtual processor (3)
  UltraSPARC-III+ (portid 3 impl 0x15 ver 0x23 clock 900 MHz)
The physical processor has 1 virtual processor (4)
  UltraSPARC-III+ (portid 4 impl 0x15 ver 0x23 clock 900 MHz)
The physical processor has 1 virtual processor (5)
  UltraSPARC-III+ (portid 5 impl 0x15 ver 0x23 clock 900 MHz)
The physical processor has 1 virtual processor (6)
  UltraSPARC-III+ (portid 6 impl 0x15 ver 0x23 clock 900 MHz)
The physical processor has 1 virtual processor (7)
  UltraSPARC-III+ (portid 7 impl 0x15 ver 0x23 clock 900 MHz)

Hope that helps. :-)

EDIT

A multicore machine has e.g. this output

The physical processor has 4 virtual processors (0-3)
  SPARC64-VI (portid 1024 impl 0x6 ver 0x93 clock 2150 MHz)
The physical processor has 4 virtual processors (8-11)
  SPARC64-VI (portid 1032 impl 0x6 ver 0x93 clock 2150 MHz)

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Sun Sparc – Fix ‘Inserted Disabled’ Error While Upgrading T5120 Memory

Sun Solaris – Find out number of processors and cores

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