Solaris 2.6 installer fails to create filesystems on SPARCstation IPX

[MrKsoft]

I'm using a BlueSCSI v2-2023.03a (firmware v2024.12.08) in a Sun SPARCstation IPX, with both the hard drive image and Solaris 2.6 installer image on the device.

I am able to use the format utility to create a disk label, so writing to the disk does work, but when the Solaris installer attempts to create the filesystems, it errors out:

Configuring disk (c0t3d0)
    - Creating Solaris disk label (VTOC)

Creating and checking UFS file systems
    - Creating / (c0t3d0s0)

ERROR: File system creation failed for / (c0t3d0s0)

ERROR: Could not check or create system critical file systems

ERROR: Could not update disks with new configuration

No other output is given by Solaris to describe the nature of the error. I have attached a debug log of the system booting, going into the Solaris installer, and at the very end attempting to create the filesystems. All commands appear to come back "Good".

log.txt

I tried a few SD cards, HDD image sizes, termination changes, etc and found no difference between any of them. I have not tried other versions of Solaris yet, as on this slow machine it takes about 15 minutes to get to this point each time.

[sideburn]

It’s a UNIX System!

(Sorry I couldn’t resist 🤣 )

[erichelgeson]

Sun is very picky on drive geometry, even though SCSI uses LBA addressing. A user in Discord reported success when mimic the fujitsu 9.0 Gig geometry from this page https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.sun.admin/c/YWH_KChrvsM - You can find the ini keys for heads, tracks, etc here https://github.com/blueSCSI/blueSCSI-v2/wiki/bluescsi.ini

[MrKsoft]

Thanks, this is the info I was missing. I was able to use nhead/nsect values from that format.dat and it "just works" after that. The Compatibility section of the wiki should probably mention this, as it only talks about setting up the CD-ROM for 512 byte sectors.

[erichelgeson]

I'm not very familiar with sun/solairs (just remembered seeing the convo on discord) - if you could please add any relevant details I'd appreciate it (and so would the next sun user :)

[MrKsoft]

Will do - just doing some additional testing first to make sure my assumptions are correct and that it works with SunOS 4 as well (which has no autodetection of disk parameters). I'm thinking a table with the settings that match the standard Sun disk geometries that SunOS 4 ships with, since that will make setting up the OS considerably easier than trying to define an arbitrary disk.