Hello, I need to install a hard drive on an Ultra Sparc 10 machine running Solaris. I have connected the hard drive to the CPU and would like to know how to go about installing and using it. I have rebooted the machine after connecting the hard disk but i am still not sure if the hard disk has been installed properly. Since i am very much new to this stuff, I am unable to figure out how to go about with the installation. Should i mount it or do something like that.. I am not sure. Kindly help me. Thank you.

If the operating system sees the drive, it will be reported at boot time. A quick check is to just run the format utility. If the system sees it, it will be reported in the disk drive menu selection. # format If it shows up, you may need to format the drive and partition it. At that point you can get out of format and build a unix file system on the partitions as needed. You do not mount a drive, but rather you mount a "file system". So, you need to build the file system first. Once it is mounted (connected to the unix tree), you can "cd" into it, create files, etc.

that's my computer! :) runs Debian though... okay, if i remember correctly, type "touch /reconfigure" as root. then reboot (i assume if you own a sparc then you know how to reboot the correct way). now, once you're logged back in as root, cd to /dev/rdsk and look around. now type "format" and it should ask you which disk you would like to format. select your new HD. type "?" to be sure, but i'm pretty sure you want to type "partition". use "?" a bunch more times and deal out the space on the new disk. once you're done in the partition prompt, tell it to write it and then quit the format utility. then you just gotta use "newfs" to actually format the new disk device, and then mount that disk device (you should add it to /etc/vfstab and reboot to make sure it's recognized where you want it to be)

Hello David and Paul, I was able to do whatever was mentioned in your previous mails without any problem. However, the external SCSI hard drive is not being detected at all. The 2 internal hard drives are being detected and i am able to mount them as you have specified in your mails. But the problem is with this external hard drive which is not getting detected. I have checked the connections and the Power supply and everything is fine(the LEDs light up on the front and back sides of the hard drive). However, the second LED for the disk activity does not light up at all. not even does it flicker. Is there anything else like a device driver which needs to be installed for this scuzzy disk drive? The device driver did not come along with the hard drive, so should i download it from somewhere else? Kindly guide me to complete this installation. I really appreciate the help and guidance given by you so far and hope to hear from you again. Thank you Regards Balaji

well, my Ultra 10 did not come with a built-in SCSI controller. i have run Solaris 8, Solaris 9, Debian Linux 3.0, and OpenBSD 3.1 on it. i originally put a "PC-Style" Adaptec PCI scsi card in. it was fine, but it only worked in Linux and you can't boot from it (you'll notice that the drivers for Solaris/SPARC are few and far between when it comes to "PC-Style" PCI cards). so, i searched for "sun pci scsi" or something on ebay and got one of those for a few dollars which works like a charm in all OSes. i can't really help you if i don't know your SCSI situation, because as far as i know, the Ultra 10s didn't come with SCSI built in (i hope you're not confusing the parallel port for an old db25 scsi connection)

I just installed a 60G ATA (IDE) drive in my Ultra 5 tonight and on boot up (during the memory test) I did a Stop-A, then a "probe-ide" and I was able to troubleshoot where the drive was (on the bus) and whether it was being recognized (it was). Then I booted from my solaris CD-ROM by doing a "boot cdrom" and the rest is cake. --Brian

Brian, I've been having trouble installing a Western Digital 80GB drive in my Ultra 5. I am running Solaris 8 2/02, so the drive should work. It's not formatted correctly, so I tried installing Solaris on it from CD with it as the only hard drive and I get formatting errors and installation process halts. Do you have any ideas what's going on? Thanks, Mike