Managers, Thanks to all who replied. The question was, Is it possible to mount, manipulate and create bootable SPARC platform CD/DVD's from an x86 platform? -- The answer is, well, kindof... The only slice that is platform-independent is the hfs slice 0, which is mounted later in the boot process. Slice 1 contains the actual kernel, and it MUST be UFS for the disc to be bootable. When I say "UFS", I mean "SPARC UFS" vs "x86 UFS", because the two are actually different and incompatible. Yes, you can remotely copy data between the two architectures, but some translation takes place before the data is readable at the destination. If (from an x86 machine) you dd the SPARC slices directly from the vendor media, make an ISO, then burn it to disc, the resulting disc will boot fine on a SPARC, but you cannot mount/manipulate the slices. Because of this, I gave up on creating the x86 server because I need to be able to manipulate the slices (i.e. change my flash archive payload) before burning them to disc. I tried creating a UDFS payload file system, but when I was done it was too big to fit on the DVD. (By the way, UDFS isn't bootable :-) So far the consensus is that there are no tools availble for cross-platform UFS work (if anyone out there knows something I don't, please send me an email). Sun, however, is now working on ZFS, which will be cross-platform compatible. According to Sun's website ( http://www.sun.com/emrkt/campaign_docs/expertexchange/knowledge/solaris_zfs_perf.html#35 ), the first release of ZFS won't be bootable, but they're working on it. Personally, I think that waiting for bootable ZFS will take less time than trying to do this the hard way... Thanks again to all for the replies, Enoch _______________________________________________ sunmanagers mailing list sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org http://www.sunmanagers.org/mailman/listinfo/sunmanagersReceived on Mon Jun 13 18:37:12 2005
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