Formatting a Blade 100 ide disk 1

[Number18]

I have a blade 100 and it has ide disks in it, I installed Aurora linux on the system and now can not reinstall Solaris.

I can not format the disk using the format command but I can create partitions manually.

My jumpstart server will not install the machine because it says it has no matching disk profile.

I can not install it from CD either.

I ran mkfs and managed to create a partition but I can still not install the machine.

Format tells me to use the manufacturers format utility but I do not have anything other than the format command, newfs doesn't work it tells me the frag size is wrong.

I am going round the twist here having spent all day dicking around with it and having no luck searching the web for a solution.

Is this disk fubar'd or can I recover it with a simple procedure?

I know that SUN ide disks have some magic disk header on them so to prevent you using a normal ide disk in them is this the thing that is kaputt?

Please put me out of my misery and tell me how to fix it, I really do not want to spend over a grand buying a disk from SUN.

Cheers

Steve

 

[Annihilannic]

Maybe it has a DOS-style partition table on it? I don't have much experience of Solaris/x86, but you could try using the 'label' command in format to write a Sun disk label before creating partitions.

Annihilannic.

 

[Number18]

Hi Annihilannic

it is not an x86 system it is a Blade 100 Sparc workstation.

I have tried everything I can think of including using the label command but nothing seems to work.

I am still playing around with it.

I have deleted the format.dat file aswell and still it makes no difference.

I reckon I am snookered and had better just bite the bullet and admit defeat, one thing I will remember is NEVER! install Linux on a Sparc machine with IDE disks.

It just goes to verify my reasons for thinking Linux is the scurge of the earth.

Cheers
Steve

 

[Annihilannic]

Sorry, I meant Solaris with IDE disks... was confusing myself.

Ah, but is Linux or Solaris to blame here?

How about using dd to dump zeros to the raw device and starting again from scratch, e.g. dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0 count=1024

Annihilannic.

 

[Number18]

Will give it a go thanks.

The thing that is confusing me is that I can use format to create and modify partitions and labels etc but I can not newfs any of the file systems I create.

 

[sunny1504]

Can you try this in the format utility go to 'type' and then 'auto configure'.
Probably this might work..

If nothing works then last solution to do is low level format.

Thanks
D'Souza

 

[Number18]

Yep tried that and it only gave me 2 options and one was the disk and label installed and another option.

If I selected the disk installed it told me formated ok and no defect list available.

Anyway I have fixed it thanks I did what Annihilannic suggested with the dd command.

Cheers
Steve