Hi, On Fri, Oct 02, 2015 at 03:17:18PM +0100, David Brownlee wrote: > On 2 October 2015 at 15:01, Eric Christopherson > <[email protected]> wrote: > > A very generous list member just gave me a SPARCStation 20 with SunOS > > 4.1.4 on it. I thought the first thing I would do would be to image > > its hard drive in my Linux PC, in case I ever wanted to start fresh. > > > > I assume that if I make a bitwise copy of it, I can later write those > > same bits out. But now I'm wondering what would happen if the disk > > developed marked bad sectors; would that make an exact image > > impossible to write onto it?
Years ago I contributed part of a SunOS-4 FAQ on installing SunOS "by hand" extacting the tar files from the distribution CD. It is easy, provided you have the files, and have a way of partitioning and extracting them onto the destination drive, and can write the provided bootblock onto the drive. I'll re-post that here once I find it, unless someone finds it via Google. > > I have a disc image of that release, but unfortunately no SCSI CD-ROM. > > It occurs to me that I could perhaps make a SunOS filesystem on Linux > > and untar things from either the install CD or the image of the > > original HD into it, but I don't know if that would produce something > > actually bootable. I'm hoping there would be some way within Linux to > > capture the actual format of the filesystem to use as a skeleton. ... > > Does anyone know if this is possible (viz. creating a valid, bootable > > filesystem and untarring files into it)? Or should I just invest in a > > CD-ROM drive? I'd think it would be pretty easy to find a SCSI cdrom drive for next to nothing these days. I recently discarded a large quantitiy of them. Some drives needed to by jumpered for 512 byte sectors to boot older Suns, but some just worked right automatically. Mark -- Mark G. Thomas ([email protected]), KC3DRE
