The problem, which Sun Help help couldn't solve, ended up being a
due to a confusion of operating systems. Originally I re-installed
Solaris rather than Sun OS. It was under this operating system that
I created the partitions. I did not repartition, newfs, and fsck them
under Sun OS. This caused the problem with the bootblk.
After I had gone back and re-installed Sun OS from scratch, which
re-partitioned etc. the drive I realized that this might have been the
cause. I booted up under the proper CD, newfs and fsck the partitions
to clear them, re-installed from my backup tape, and then installed the
bootblk and it worked.
Also the system itself came back up. Again, thankyou all for your
help and suggestions. Even the ones that didn't cover the correct
problem, due to my typos, were greatly appreciated. This was my
first major disaster recovery problem and it was comforting to know
this resource was there.
David Pendleton,
Network Engineer (That's right, not Unix Administrator)
OAO Corp.
Original Problem:
I am trying to restore a machine from 4mm tape. It is running Sun OS
4.1.3 Because of some Appletalk Daemons it was running we are
trying to install the root partitions as well as the data
The drive is target 3 (sd0) . I have the partitions set up with 38 meg
for / on a, 38 meg for swap on b, 180 meg for /usr on g, and 180 meg
for /home on h.
After booting from the CD in miniroot I
1. newfs /dev/rds0a
2. fsck /dev/rds0a
3. mount /dev/sd3a /a
4. cd /usr/mdec
5. installboot /a /boot bootsd /dev/rsd0a
And I get the error message:
Cannot install /boot: Is a directory.
I called Sun Help support, he walked me through it again. I have
tried this with two different backup tapes and also with other
partitions than the root partition, including a different drive and the
message remains the same.