>>> I'm assuming that if I drop down to a shell from the installer,
>>> _prior_ to actually performing the install and do something along
>>> the lines of
>>> # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sd0c bs=1024k count=whatever
>>> this would zap the entire disk contents?
>> Yes [...].  It is severe overkill, and you will have to redo your
>> partition table afterwards, but in the process of razing the city it
>> _will_ demolish the shed you want torn down. :-)
> Crikey - you're up early, assuming of course, that you're based in
> Canada 8-)

Yes, Canada; Montreal, to be specific.

And actually, no, I'm not up early; I'm up late. >:-)

> Couple of points.  You say I'll have to "redo" my partition table;
> will the installer do this for me?

It's another one of those things the installer is supposed to do and
usually does do.  Whether the 1.6.2/sparc installer actually does so is
another question; since most Sun disks already have Sun partition
tables on them, it's one of those things that - like installing
bootblocks - could easily have gotten insufficient testing.

> If so, then it looks like the way forward is

> [abbreviated: (1) reinstall, manually mount new root, chroot to it;
> (2) copy second-stage bootblock into place; (3) run installboot]
> points 2 & 3 are copied almost verbatim from the 1.6.2 man page for
> installboot (8).

Sounds good - though you likely can skip the reinstall part of step 1,
since you already have an OS on the disk.  You probably can just boot
the installer, skip the install, and go directly to dropping to a shell
to do the mount/chroot/etc steps.

> No prizes for guessing what I'll be doing this weekend

:-/  If you have trouble, drop me a line off-list - I've done a lot of
SPARC installs....

> "There are two major products that came out of Berkeley; LSD and UNIX.
> We don't believe this to be a coincidence."

Actually, didn't UNIX come out of New Jersey?  Only the BSD variants
really came from Berkeley - and that reads better next to LSD anyway. :)

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