Thanks very much for your explanations, Lars. Personally, as a long-time user of other OSes and newbie on Solaris, I may consider this a serious disadvantage, since I never encountered this problem elsewhere. Of course, if there were other disks, /etc/fstab would have to change. Of course, I would never expect X to come up nor a network connection; not to talk about audio. But the kernels I have used until now (mainly Linux and BSD) would load the drivers for the disk controllers, keyboard, even mouse, NIC and so forth if I moved the single drive of a system physically as a single drive into a new box. The only item to be moved eventually was a 'wd' to 'sd' or similar.
> Assuming you transfer the system disk to a new PC > with an identical Disc-Controller > things might be more feasible . ( Pls note that > the Disk enumeration needs to be identical as well, > if the system disk was unit 0 in the old box it cant > be unit 2 in the new one, /etc/vfstab would be > incorrect and unusable ) Obvious, see above. > You just migth be able to edit the GRUB entry > from the Menu and start Solaris in > single user mode. See my post, until now, in my meager 3 installs, GRUB could boot to Failsafe. > Now you can in theory perform a reconfiguration > Boot which should regenerate > /devices and /etc/Path_to_inst You do this > with > > # touch /reconfigure > shutdown -y -g0 -i6 This is kind of what I was hoping for. I'll try next. > If the kernel manages to reboot and reconfigure it > self It should have adapted to the > the new hardware . The Solaris Kernel is Dynamic and > selfconfiguring and there is no need > to Recompile the kernel as in Linux and BSD. Please, no flames, just to understand the matter: I never had to recompile anything when using the vanilla kernels. > I hope I have convinced you that replicating system > discs is a bad Idea if the target > hardware is dissimilar. Somehow, yes. But see, I have been doing this over the last 10 years in huge numbers with Linux and BSD without major problem, that is as long as the driver(s) existed in the kernels. I posted another question before, if there was something like 'dump ... | restore ...' to very easily transfer whole partitions, even across a network. I got an answer, but it looked as if it wasn't easily feasible neither. Should I convince myself, that - as much as I have learned to adore and love 'my' Solaris installs in the last few months - I better say good-bye to the idea of 'cross-installations' ? > If you are going to install > more than 5 servers, its a much better Solution > to set up the JUMPSTART network boot environment > and boot/install every system over the network. Yeah, but I administrate a few boxes here and there, then this becomes overkill. I was simply used to the concept 'a device is a file' and to easily 'tar | dump' partitions from here to there. I had a script to 'dump' all partitions to files at a file server, and then I would boot to KNOPPIX on another machine, fdisk as I liked, download and 'restore', I'd edit /etc/fstab, boot to grub, 'setup', and my old installs were on a new box. Okay, I'll try next what you proposed and keep you updated, Uwe This message posted from opensolaris.org
