Boot Solaris 10 DVD on Sun machines (Rev: 1.4)

On January 2008, I upgraded the Sun Blade 1000 workstation from Solaris 8 Operating System (OS) to the latest Solaris 10 OS to take advantages of the variuos new features in Solaris 10 OS. I download the Solaris 10 8/07 DVD ISO files for SPARC platform from http://www.sun.com/software/solaris and burn it to DVDs.

The Sun Blade 1000 workstation has a DVD drive and can boot from Solaris 10 CDROM, but failed to boot from the Solaris 10 DVD after issuing the "boot cdrom" command at the OpenBoot PROM (OBP) command prompt. The Sun Blade 1000 workstation had the below boot error message:

Bad magic number in disk label
Can't open disk label package
Evaluating: boot cdrom
Can't open boot device

The Sun Blade 1000 workstation old OBP is version 4.2. I downloaded the Patch 118323-01 that updated the Flash PROM to OBP version 4.16.4 and solved the boot from DVD problem in the Sun Blade 1000 workstation.

You can use the below command to check your OBP version:

# prtdiag -v | grep OBP


Notes:

• Beside Sun Blade 1000 workstation, Patch 118323-01 can also update the Flash PROM for Netra T20, Sun Blade 2000 and Sun Fire 280R machines.
  
  
• For Sun Fire V480/V490 servers, please use patch 118322-01 to update the Flash PROM to version 4.17.1.
  

[August 2008] Solaris 10 8/07 had patches updated hang problem. Advisable to install Solaris 10 5/2008 or higher version as it did not has the patches updated hang problem.


Reference:

[1] Sun Microsystems Documentation