Solaris 8 x86 install hangs on initial disk boot

From: D G Teed (donald.teed@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Jun 06 2006 - 21:49:35 EDT


I've got a support call in with Sun and so far they are puzzled.

We had a system disk crash on an IBM running X86 Solaris 8.
I obtained the latest available installer CD from Sun 02/2
and a fresh new disk to install on.

Everytime I go through the CDROM boot, it sets up a swap
with the installer image on it, I reboot and I only see:

"Solaris boot sector V2"

on the screen.

There must be controller device support because the hard disks
are listed as possible boot sources from the installer and
I'm able to format/fdisk/partition it from single user mode.

fdisk is setting up 100% solaris partition - or so I try to.
Looking at the results after ward I see it set up 14 cylinders
as Active x86 Boot, and the rest as Solaris. I set up
a 4 GB swap for the installer to use for dumping
its install image.

I checked from KNOPPIX with badblocks - the disk is good.
I checked a quick Debian install and boot from disk - the
SCSI bios is good.

I've repeated the Solaris install attempt about 6 times now and
always behaves identical.

Has anyone seen this type of installer hang before?

Regards,

--Donald Teed
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