Sun

commodorejohn wrote: And now that I get it all in a text editor and look at it, I'd bet that the issue is this "unsupported logical block size" error. I just wonder how one goes about fixing that...

Ask... And you shall receive! http://www.glennklockwood.com/sysadmin-howtos/converting-blocksize-on-solaris.html

Well, that's good information, but unfortunately it doesn't do me any good since I can't install Solaris to begin with, unless there's a way to download the executable to a RAM disk over serial or Ethernet from the Solaris boot disk...or possibly mount a USB flash drive?

I don't think you can mount things on the USB from the OB prom...

Well, not from OpenBoot, but I can get to a console from the Solaris install CD; if I could just devise a way to get the executable over from there, I could run it.

changing the block size is pretty easy and is probably something you can do from Forth. My skills in it are not up to that unfortunately.

I had a similar problem with my Blade 1500 last month, with the mesagge 'Bad magic number' and 'Can`t create newfs' . My disk partitions started on cylinder 0 while Solaris needs to start on cylinder 1.
I had to delete all partitions, create a new one starting from cyl 1 and relabel the disk. All done from the console of the installer disk.

I was following a guide on the net but I can't find it now but the procedure is similar to one explined in this thread with the format utility:

http://compgroups.net/comp.unix.solaris/newfs-command-failed/92821

If you have a fibre channel hba on an sgi, you could fx(1m) it. It is very straightforward to do.

I'm pretty sure my O2 doesn't have Fibre Channel.

You might be able to low level format the drive using the format command on the Solaris install disc. Another route may be to download and burn SystemRescueCD 0.4.0 Sparc64 and use it to run the linux version of sg3-utils. Either way try to have the machine on a UPS when doing this, a power failure can permanently ruin a drive while performing a low level format to change the block size.
If worse comes to worse, you could install solaris on a IDE drive attached to one of the IDE busses. Just beware the IDE busses on these machines are VERY SLOW.

Here is another issue I ran into recently with my cheap sun blade 2500. I had all sorts of strange issues trying to install the latest version of solaris 10. The target drives not showing up sometimes among the problems. However my solaris 10u2 media kit worked just fine.
It turned out the stock lite-on dvd drive sun used dosen't like DVD+R discs. Solaris would silently ignore read errors. I just replaced the drive with a different IDE DVD drive and the install and upgrades magically started working all the time.

Update: finally sat down and got (most of) the issues sorted out. I picked up a hard drive with the correct low-level format; hopefully I can LLF the other two once I've got a full Solaris install up and running on that one. I also nabbed an XVR-600, which has the advantage of having only one port, so I know it's correct. And I figured out that the reason it wouldn't come up in graphical console mode is that it didn't like my USB keyboard (I think it's because it's one of those built-in-hub ones with the pass-through port for a mouse.) So I've finally got it booting into the Solaris graphical installer and setting up an install...huzzah.

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Aaaand now posting from Firefox on Solaris 10