Infrastructure Software

29 January 2012

As I previously marked the original version of this question as Answered, let me return to it in a new thread. I have a Sun Ultra 60 Workstation running Solaris 9, and I wish to upgrade it to Solaris 10 (8/11 version). It will not take Solaris 11. But Solaris 10 only comes as a 2GB .iso image suitable for DVD, not CD. This machine has no DVD burner or reader.

User abrante (Magnus) suggested using lofiadd -a to interpret the .iso file as a logical device, mount the logical device on the system, then use Live Upgrade to create a Solaris 10 boot environment from the image. This all works, except for the last step. I can mount the .iso image as an ordinary file system, and browse through it in the usual way. I was able to load the Live Upgrade software via pkgadd. I was even able to run the Installer executable on the image, direct from the command line. This installed the Live Upgrade software again, but would not install anything else. And the kicker--the Live Upgrade software would not recognize the interpreted image as a Boot Environment. For that matter, it would not recognize the original boot environment on the system as a boot environment. For example:

unknown# lucurr
ERROR: No boot environments are configured on this system
ERROR: cannot determine boot environment name for mount point </>
unknown# lustatus
ERROR: No boot environments are configured on this system
ERROR: cannot determine list of all boot environment names

This is rather odd, as the system does boot to a working Solaris 9 system. Trying to use the .iso image--mounted on /mnt--as a source for lucreate gets

ERROR: source bot environment </mnt> does not exist.
ERROR: cannot create new boot environment using options provided.

OK, so what's the missing trick? How do I get the Live Upgrade software to recognize boot environments, and in particular how do I get it to recognize the .iso image interpreted by lofi?

Many thanks for your further assistance.

Sincerely,
Ian H. Redmount