SUMMARY: Need help restoring Sun3 (without boot tape)

From: Andy Feldt (feldt@phyast.nhn.uoknor.edu)
Date: Wed Aug 10 1994 - 04:03:05 CDT


Thanks to all who responded. The original plea is appended below. The
winning answer was (first) from:

Dave Mitchell <D.Mitchell@dcs.shef.ac.uk>

who wrote:

> I may be stating the obvious, but you *did* use a sun3 boot-bock, didnt you?
>
> ie
>
> mount <sun3-/> /mnt_root
> mount <sun3-/usr> /mnt_usr
>
> cd /usr/kvm/mdec
> installboot -h /mnt_root/boot /mnt_usr/kvm/mdec/bootsd /dev/rsdXX

This was the key. I had assumed that the proto bootblock was generic and
that only the installboot program was kernel specific, while it is the
reverse. (And makes sense in hindsight...)

The most common response was to boot the sun3 as diskless and then run
installboot, but it was far simpler to attach the disk to another system
and do as above. There were also offers of boot tapes which I also appreciated.

Thanks also to:

Mike Maciolek <mikem@centerline.com> (also with the best solution)
Gautam Das <gautam@bwc.org>
ruupoe@thijssen.nl (Ruud van Poelgeest)
bernards@ECN.NL (Marcel Bernards)
Dan Stromberg - OAC-DCS <strombrg@bingy.acs.uci.edu>
peter.allan@aea.orgn.uk (Peter Allan)
Eckhard.Rueggeberg@ts.go.dlr.de (Eckhard Rueggeberg)
gdmr@dcs.ed.ac.uk
anderson@neon.mitre.org (Mark S. Anderson)
jannis@jsun.aws.waii.com (Jim Annis)
pstat1!crm@uunet.uu.net
nishan@lambo.alldata.com (Nishan Sandhar)
mike@trdlnk.com (Michael Sullivan)
kwthomas@nsslsun.nssl.uoknor.edu (Kevin W. Thomas)
r.evans@ic.ac.uk

and any others who may still respond.

Andy Feldt
System Support Programmer
Department of Physics and Astronomy
The University of Oklahoma

> Folks,
>
> I have inherited a Sun3 which was running 4.1.1. The disk crashed and
> has been replaced. I have dumps of / and /usr (to a remote tape) which
> I have restored to the replacement disk by:
>
> 1) temporarily loading 4.1.1 on a SparcStation 2
> 2) attaching the replacement disk temporarily to the Sparc 2
> 3) running newfs on the partitions
> 4) restoring the / and /usr partitions
>
> I then ran installboot (still from the Sparc 2), moved the disk to the Sun3
> and attempted to boot. This failed. I suspect it is because installboot
> on sun4c architectures places an 'a.out' header on the boot block (and
> tells you so when installboot runs). I do not have tapes for the sun3
> architecture at all, or I would boot the miniroot from the tape and run
> the proper installboot. Is there any way to get this system running with
> no access to a sun3 architecture boot tape? Have I missed something obvious?
> I do not have access to anything but the sun4c architecture in terms of
> something I can attach a SCSI disk to...
>
> Thanks for any help!
>
> Andy Feldt
> System Support Programmer
> Department of Physics and Astronomy
> The University of Oklahoma
>



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