Problems installing SOLARIS 2.5.1

[VAadmin]

First let me say that I understand that 2.5.1 is incredibly old. However it is the mandated OS for the software I am running. My problem is my Enterprise 3500 crashed not to long ago. We contacted SUN tech support, who immediately began replacing circuit boards. My problem is that now 2.5.1 will not run (SOLARIS 8 or better install fine). The installation seems to run fine, however after the required reboot the server will never come back up (begins to then reboots itself). SUN tells me to install the Recommended patch set prior to the reboot. My problem is that I can get the patch files to the hard drive, and uncompress them. However every time I try to run the install_cluster it errors out. A look on the drive partitions shows that all directories have a /a in front of them (I'm guessing this is something SOLARIS does for the install). I have tried to modify the install_cluster file adding the /a were ever is looks for a directory, but that has been unsuccessful. Does anyone have any ideas how to install this cluster?

 

[coffeysm]

This might work...not sure though.

install_cluster -R /a

 

[VAadmin]

Thanks coffeysm
I did try something similar already, but not simply /a. I will try that next.

 

[VAadmin]

Well placing everything in /a, and modify the install_cluster file accordingly seems to have fixed the problem of installing the patches. However now when the server reboots it is unable to locate or mount the /var. SOLARIS recommends running fsck manually which if attempted gives me the following error:
can't stat /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s4