Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Segmentation faults when formatting a disk in Solaris

I've had an old Sun Ultra 5 under my desk since I've started at the current job. Instead of keeping it as my footstool, I decided to fire it up and see what happens. Needless to say, this has been a timesuck. I could go into all the details and other mistakes on my part, but it isn't very interesting.

What I didn't know would be a problem was trying to install Solaris 10 after I had impatiently installed NetBSD. Apparently the Solaris installer doesn't know how to recognize the disk formatted by NetBSD. When running "format", it just segfaults and dumps core.

After some Google searches, I came up on this thread.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.unix.solaris/browse_thread/thread/8107078ff8e2174d?pli=1

after running

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0 bs=512 count=4

I was able to run format on the disk, and run the Solaris 10 install.

2 comments:

Matt said...

wow! That sounds heavy-handed, but whatever works.

I wonder if it was the partition format...

Reamer77 said...

Yeah, I was in a position where I didn't know exactly what to do, and since the hardware was so old, it wouldn't be a big deal if it was accidentally trashed.

I'm guessing it was the partition format as well. I was surprised that Solaris would just choke on it instead of detecting it as a non-Solaris compatible format. I read elsewhere that this has been "fixed" in OpenSolaris, but I didn't see a Sparc release of it on Sun's site.