About John Storta, Jr. Expertise I am a Sun Certified Solaris Administrator. I can answer virtually any question relating to the administration of Sun servers. I have experience installing hardware, managing user accounts, maintaining file systems, setting up backup and recovery plans, configuring Veritas NetBackup, and general troubleshooting.
Experience I have been a UNIX System Administrator for 5 years. I have implemented 5 systems as a Project Leader. I have seen a wide range of problems over the years and found solutions for all of them.
Organizations Independant Computer Consultants Association
Education/Credentials Sun Certified Solaris Administrator
Training in Oracle SQL and Veritas NetBackup
30+ university level Computer Science credits
Awards and Honors Received outstanding service award for my achievements
Recognized by VP and CEO following system implementation
Expert: John Storta, Jr. Date: 3/2/2001 Subject: boot floppy for Solaris 7 installation
Question John,
I had asked you some questions regarding booting the system for installing solaris.i am very happy about your answers.I followed your instructions and downloaded both dos versions of DD command and DCA image(this is not in executable form and comes up 'with open' with option when double clicked).Then I copied DD.exe to A drive and used the command
A:\>dd S7_0899.3..3 a:
I get the error that
dd: Error during OPEN of [S7_0899.3..3]
the file of image is 1.4MB if I don't have dd.exe in a:\ the command will not work so both together may be exceeding the floppy size. I don't know the exact problem.Please help me Urgently.
Many many thanks,
Rooparani.
-----------------------------------------------
booting the system
John, thankyou for the detailed answer.I will follow your instructions. At this instance I am not trying to have both the operating systems at the same. My problem is more at DOS level which I am not good at. 1. I had installed Win2000 earlier. 2.then I changed the boot order to 'CD first' in CMOS setup for installing solaris 3.then I booted with Solaris install CD 4.It would not recognize the CD and would go to installed win2000 5.So I formatted the hard disk using installation steps for win 2000 (During installation it asks for deleting the partion during installation,at this step after formatting HD I quit the installation) 6.I tried to boot the system with boot floppies prepared using Win95 the system will DOS boot but does not recognize my CD for installing Solaris through CD. May be it requires configuration of config.sys or autoexec.bat I am not familier with using these files I don't know from where to get these files from. when I try to copy these files rom NT o/s they are empty. Where can I get these files from and what changes do I make for these? Please help me.The problem is more of DOS level rather than of other o/s I am not familier with DOS thanks, Rooparani ------------------------- Followup To Question - I am trying to install diffrent oprating systems on my home PC for learning more about them I installed win2000 server and after few days I erased it to install solaris7 intel based.But when I put my solaris CD and reebooted to start the installation my computer could not recognise my CDrom drive. I dont know about configuring config.sys or outoexec.bat. Please let me know how I have to go about!!! I had the same problem when I erased NTserver to linux has it got anything to do with master boot record written by NT or win2000.I am not sure of how to takle this please help me at the earliest. Answer - I don't have a tremendous amount of experience with this, but this is the way I understand it. Boot to a DOS prompt and use fdisk to create two partitions. The first partition should be a UNIX(non-dos) partition. The second will be a FAT16 or FAT32 partition and should be set as the active partition. Install Windows to the second partition. That will allow you to boot to it automatically by default. Install Solaris to the first partition. I believe you will need to have the DCA floppy in the drive whenever you plan to boot to Solaris, otherwise it will boot to the active partition, which is Windows. The sequence is important. You must install Windows first and you must install Solaris onto the first partition. Solaris' boot block must be on disk 0. I think Windows overwrites all partitions if you install it last. Solaris asks you if you wish to preserve data on the disks. You must answer yes. I will continue researching this and see if I run across any other information. Keep me posted on your progress and I will be glad to help in any way that I can. John
In order to install Solaris on an Intel machine, you will need the Device Configuration Diskette. If you do not have one, you can get a copy from the following link. http://soldc.sun.com/support/drivers/dca_diskettes/ There are some instructions on how to get the files properly copied to a floppy. Make sure you get the right one for your version of Solaris. The Device Configuration Assistant(DCA) is basically the Solaris equivalent to a Windows boot disk. Just boot your computer with the DCA disk in the floppy drive and the Solaris installation will start. You cannot install Solaris on Intel without this disk. It will take care of locating the CD-ROM and all that. There are no autoexec.bat or config.sys files in Solaris. Those are specific to DOS/Windows. Let me know if you have any problems. John
Answer Here is how I did it. The only problem I ran across is I had to rename the image file that was downloaded to something without all of those periods.
I renamed it to s7_1199.dca
I didn't notice until afterwards that you were using a different version of the file. Please try this procedure and let me know if you still have the same problem.
1) Downloaded both the dd.exe and s7_1199.s..s file.
- I downloaded them to a temp folder C:\temp
2) Renamed the s7_1199.s..3 file to s7_1199.dca
3) From the download directory c:\temp, I ran this command
- c:\temp> dd s7_1199.dca a:
Everything copied without incident.
What I different from your procedure is I did not copy everything to the floppy disk before running the command. I left everything in the temp folder.
