Date: 06/22/07 (IT Professionals)    Keywords: no keywords

First off, let me say that I'm not a Unix person. I don't really know much about it, and I've never had to learn any kind of administration stuff for it.

Unfortunately, being the only IT person in a company means I get handed a lot of projects I don't necissarily know how to do at first.

I have a SPARC machine that I'm trying to install Solaris 10 on. The reason for this? We already have the hardware (it's rather old) and we don't have to pay for the operating system. Woo! So, we're using it (fortunately, it's not for anything system critical, like our file server. I'm making this the intranet server). Might as well, considering we paid for it.


This used to be the company's old file server machine. Like...at least 3 years ago. Way before I worked here. It ran Solaris 8 without any issues that I know of.

There are RAID drives set up to combine a bunch of them, so that's possibly where an issue is arising, but I know next to nothing about Solaris, and even less about setting up a RAID on it.


I have the Solaris 10 discs (Solaris 10, 11/06 release) sitting in front of me. I can boot to the CD ROM, I can go through the Gui installation procedure without any problem. I told the installer to do a fresh install because I wanted to wipe all the data that used to be on here. Backups were made when this machine went out of production, and frankly, if someone hasn't asked for a piece of data in 3+ years, they're probably not going to ask for it. Hell, most of the staff that was employed when this went out of service isn't working here anymore.

So, fresh install.

I don't have any problems with the installation process (except for some 'omg I don't like this static IP you gave me!' issues, but that's beside the point). I answered all the questions, provided all the information, and I let it go.

I told it not to reboot automatically, so when I came back, it wanted a reboot. It also seemed to go through the install rather quickly. Despite that, I rebooted the machine like it asked. And that's when the trouble started.

The machine rebooted and looked like it was doing everything fine. It'd initialize the memory like it knew what it was doing, pop up one or two more things on the screen, have a siezure and flash tons of stuff up there and reboot again.

I thought maybe I messed something up, so I tried reinstalling. Again. With the same results. I've now installed 2 additional times, trying different things, and I still don't receive any different results.

What I found odd about the install process besides the fact that it seemed to go abnormally fast (I checked on it through 10% complete, I'd have to walk away for something and when I'd come back 10 minutes later it'd be done), was that it never asked me for any of the other 4 CD's.

Perhaps something is messed up with the installation procedure? Either way, I'm about to shoot this freakin thing.

Cross posted a small bit

Source: http://community.livejournal.com/itprofessionals/60943.html