On 10-Oct-99 at 14:13, Erin Corliss (ecorliss@coffee.corliss.net) wrote:
> See, I have a Sparc 2 with no floppy drive.  I have a SCSI CD-ROM drive
> and several SCSI hard drives of various sizes.  I can write to these SCSI
> drives by hooking them to my PC...  I can't netboot the thing because the
> only trasceiver I have for it is 10-base-t, and I don't have a hub or an
> uplink cable. The only options I can see for booting and installing an OS
> are:
> 
> 1.  burning a bootable CD with a simulated 1.44 meg disk.  Problem is, I
> don't know if the Sparc will boot the CD like this.

Probably not.  Sun needed to do bootable CDs long before there was any
standard for it, so IIRC, they do it a bit oddly.  Not all CD-ROM drives
will have the capability to boot Sun CD-ROMs.  (I think it requires
multi-session support; but it might be some other feature.)

But you could try putting the floppy image on a small hard disk
partition and booting from that.


> 2.  Dumping a pre-formatted hard disk image to one of the SCSI drives.  I
> don't have a disk image to do this with, so I'd have to ask on a mailing
> list somewhere for a kind soul to make one...(hint hint)

The disk image would probably have to have the same geometry as your
actual disk.


> 3.  I heard that you can connect two machines with thicknet ethernet ports
> together with a short ribbon cable and it will work -- then I could
> netboot from my linux machine.

If by 'thicknet ethernet port', you mean the AUI port (DBX-15, with
the sliding latch); no, you cannot just connect two of them together
for a point-to-point link.


Your best bet is probably to buy or borrow a 10baseT crossover cable
and setup a network with your Linux box.  Or find someone else with
a SPARC/sun4c box, take your disk to them and let them do the install
onto your disk.


-Pat