new_guy wrote: > Hi guys, > > I just received an old Sun Netra T1 (105) that has an older version of > Solaris (SunOS 5.9). It has two 18GB SCSI drives, no cd or floppy drives. > There is a serial/LOM port that I can access and dual Ethernet ports. I can > get the ok prompt (Stop-A), the LOM prompt and boot SunOS in various > modes... just can't log on. > > I plan to install OpenBSD onto it by doing a net boot/install, but before > doing so, I'd like to attempt to mount the current drives or at least dd > them to files. The Solaris install has a root password that I do not know. > boot -s works, but it still prompts for root password.
(OT: fix for that is "boot cdrom -s" from a Solaris install cd, then wack the root PW from /etc/shadow. I'm guessing you can do the same with a netboot). > Will a net boot with a bsd.rd kernel allow me to dd the drives before > installing OpenBSD? Assuming you are dd'ing the entire disk (/dev/rsdXc): depends on what you are dd'ing to, but if to a file on another local drive, definitely. dd'ing to a device across the net might be a bit more exciting, as I'm not sure if there are sufficient tools on the install disk to do that easily. You could even pull the drive out, put it in another machine (different platform, even!), and dd it there. You *may* be able to mount the Solaris partitions in OpenBSD and access them. By coincidence more than planning, I attempted to do just that recently. Results were..mixed. My goal was a little simpler, I wanted to sync the ssh keys between a disk with OpenBSD on it and the one with Solaris on it (this was Solaris 10, I suspect you won't see much difference with Solaris 9), and being too lazy to spend a couple minutes to copy to another server and back, I spent probably more than an hour with the "easy" trick of simply copying from one OS to the other. Solaris refused to see the OpenBSD drives. Not just the OpenBSD partitions, but refused to even recognize the other drive was there. Conclusion: I'm still an idiot when it comes to Solaris (I didn't spend much time on it). More interesting was what happened when I tried to access the Solaris partitions from OpenBSD: the system panicked the first time. Unfortunately, this machine is a bit strange, and the serial port was not in use, and the keyboard was non-functional, so all I could see was the panic message on the console, but didn't look closer, figuring it would be easy to repeat. It wasn't, never panicked again doing that. However, OpenBSD didn't seem to do a really good job respecting everything Solaris wanted respected, the Solaris disk needed a manually guided fsck to be happy again. Moral: OpenBSD can deal with the entire Solaris disk as a bunch of raw sectors. It may deal with it on a partition-by-partition basis, but don't count on it, it may puke all over the Solaris partition, and possibly itself.
