Heres a complex one

[mydogbites]

I have an old solaris 8 machine here, and and have a TAR tape which was done on a machine with the same OS.

I need to extract the TAR file, which is over a 100Gb onto this machine.

The TAR tape does not work on any other Tar program incluing linux and windows, it just exracts a load of crap where records should be. But when i TVF the file on the solaris machine it works fine.

The problem is i cannot seem to install a hard drive big enough and ive been told solaris cannot handle drives bigger than 10 Gb. Is this true?

Also any ideas how to get this data off of the tape, not being a solaris user im not to familiar with the OS, so any help would be greatful.

Cheers

James

 

[Mike042]

...ive been told solaris cannot handle drives bigger than 10 Gb. Is this true?
Solaris can certainly handle drives bigger than 10GB, some of the SunFire range come with 36 or 73GB drives, and 146GB drives have been available for some time. We have systems attcahed to a SAN with 512GB disks.

If your disk is not big enough to hold 100GB from the TAR file, is it practical to start the TAR from tape in 'background' and spool the files off to other disks or systems as they arrive (or delete them if they are not required). Messy I know, but a possibility.

I hope that helps.

Mike

 

[mydogbites]

Thanks, unfortunatley the tar file is one massive 100Gb file, plus a few folders, so there is no way of piping files off as they come :-(

If i could get hold of a drive big enough, do u know of anywhere on the net there is a guide to formatting and adding a hard rive onto a system?

i know the basics like reset-all and then doing a probe to find anything new, but finding an address etc etc i don't know about.

Cheers

James

 

[KenCunningham]

I assume you have an available slot for a drive? If so, you can shut down the machine, put in the drive and issue a boot -r from the OK prompt to reboot and reconfigure at the same time. This should make the drive available to the format utility, which you can use to slice up your drive, though presumably you will want one big slice for this large file? Then it's a matter of using newfs to make a filesystem on the slice and mounting it so that it's available.

These are the high-level steps, let us know if you need details and we'll do what we can.

All I ask of you
Is make my wildest dreams come true

 

[KenCunningham]

Additional info. at:

http://ussg.iu.edu/usail/peripherals/disks/adding/solaris.html

You're already aware of the probe, so hopefully the rest will make sense too.

All I ask of you
Is make my wildest dreams come true