From jstevens@best.ms.philips.com Wed Jun  2 18:42:42 1999
Date: Mon, 31 May 1999 09:51:42 +0200 (MET DST)
From: Jan Stevens <jstevens@best.ms.philips.com>
To: lkarrer@trash.net
Subject: sunsolcdburning

Lukas,

we are using a slightly different method (which requires a dedicated
harddisk).
As a starting point a tar file is created from slice 0, 1 and 2. The
bootblocks from slice 2 and
upwards are also extracted.

We partition the harddisk to contain all the slices except one, which
spans all used partitions.
Sizes of partitions are adapted to use all available space on the new
cd-rom(74 minutes).
The partitions are filled again with the original data and adapted to
out needs (slice 0 will change
from HSFS into UFS).

The bootblocks are put into place on the corresponding raw partition.
We now use "dd" to make a copy of the disk in a file, skipping the VTOC.

The VTOC is generated with a separate command and prepended to the
existing file.
This gives you the opportunity to leave out now used slices in the VTOC
or remap the existing
ones (Solaris 2.6 format seems to need slice 2 for disk information).

The next items are relevant:
- the tar command from Sun is capable to store and retreive all types of
file (also names pipes).
    This has been verified for Solaris 2.5.1 and 2.6.
- the depth of  the driectory tree on slice 0 is critical, one must not
use the dot (.) as starting point,
    but a list of files inside it . This limitation has been built into
tar to detect endless loops.
- the files in slices 2 and upwards are identical (only a redirect file)

- the standard cd-rom boot/installation contains a fallback mount
attempt for slice 0, trying
    to mount it as a UFS filesystem is the hsfs mount fails.
- all partitions must have a size of a multiple of 4 blocks of 512 bytes
(caused by the 2048 byte
    blocks a cd-drive uses)
- the disk used has some influence on the partitions sizes, depending on
its cylinder size.

Any package which can write a cd-rom image to cd-r can be used to write
the data file.


The advantage of this approach is the increased size of slice 0, which
can be used to add your
own data (we also replace suninstall to start our own installation).


I hope this information is usefull,


Jan Stevens

e-mail: jstevens@best.ms.philips.com