On the joys of attempting to get Solaris 10 u8 installed on a JR4

A customer wants to test this. We want to load it for them. As we have discovered in the process …. … Solaris 10 (not OpenSolaris) doesn’t like SATA DVD drives. Since the motherboard has no IDE drive, we are SOL there. But wait, can’t we use a nice shiny USB DVD drive? No dice. Doesn’t work. … ok What about a PXE boot load? Lets make it nice and simple. Put the kernel and some command line stuff in and try to get it going …. … and it didn’t work. I had to dig hard and far to find bits and pieces of what I needed. Cobbling this together, I found I could get it to PXE boot. And start an installer. Yay! Almost there … right? Well, sort of.

You see, most of the way through, after answering all the questions, setting things up, it tells me I need to eject the DVD. Automatically or manually. Except for the fact it is PXE booted … er … ah … no DVD … Uh … Ok. There has to be an easier way. Really. There has to be. Building barriers to people installing the software is no way to encouraging people installing the software. I’ve spent too many hours on this so far. I had a nice VM up to act as my target machine, since it boots faster. No dice. Same silly message. No documentation on how to get around it. Its sort of like the chicken and egg problem. If you can’t get the egg to hatch, you don’t ever have to worry about the chicken laying more eggs that won’t hatch …