Hi, I was in same situation for different reasons (laptop drive stopped reading DVDs, and no USB DVD reader available). Here's how I installed b72 on it.
Method 1: Pros: Lots of docs and howtos available Cons: Reading documents. Network boot support required on target machine. Needs another machine on local network. Details: Setup jumpstart. It literally takes 5 mins, and just works. I had forgotten that my laptop supports PXE boot, so I skipped this method. Method 2: (I used this) Pros: No other machine or network required. Might just work if you meet the requirements Cons: Difficult to get right. Lots of steps. Gory Details: 1. Find another FAT32 volume. DVD image is under 4gigs so you can put it there. 2. Extract /boot from it. 3. Use Grub4DOS to boot from this from windows NTLDR (entry needed in boot.ini for grub4dos) 4. Once the kernel loads and shows you the choices, select 6 and land into shell. 5. Mount the FAT32 volume, then mount the DVD ISO at /cdrom. WARNING, I found that in a particular build the solaris pcfs driver doesn't support >2G files!! so use dd if=/cdrom of=/dev/null to check if the whole file can be successfully read! (Refer to method 3 if it fails!) 6. exit shell, continue install 7. Joy :P Method 3: Pros: Lets you use Method 2 if pcfs driver is broken! Cons: Even more steps, requires another machine and a >=1G USB stick Details: 1. Download Belenix 2. Boot another system with it 3. Put USB stick, use "usbdump" to make the stick bootable 4. Boot your system with the USB stick 5. Partition and format the disk using Belenix 6. Copy the DVD iso from network onto one of the partitions (preferably one not to be nuked by installation, e.g. /export/home). ZFS volumes will be fine! 7. Do method 2, this time mounting the UFS/ZFS partition and then the ISO in it. This will bypass the 2GB limit in PCFS. 8. Enjoy :D HTH - Akhilesh This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
