Building A Solaris 10 Recovery DVD

Create The Flash Archive

It's important to select a partition slice that is at least large enough to hold the entire installed Solaris 10 image. The /opt file-system on my test box was created in a separate slice (c0d0s7) for such operations. It is separate from the root slice and has a generous 133 gigabyte capacity. Keep in mind that a DVD typically only holds about 4.7 Gigabytes, so the flash archive plus the install kernel and tools must all fit within that limit. In addition, the author of the previously mentioned procedure claims, "Intel systems seem to have issues with FLAR's over 2 GB in length." As a consequence, it is best to create a flash archive soon after the node is built, drivers loaded, video, sound and everything else configured, but before extra software is loaded so that the image size is still relatively small. Generally speaking, the flash archive created in compressed format came in at 1.9 gigabytes and the boot image plus tools (I deleted a lot of unnecessary packages from the install DVD) at an additional 0.93 gigabytes. Besides compression, the flarcreate utility also allows you to exclude directories from the archive with the "-x" option to help in reducing the size. I tend to install software, like Sun does, in the /opt directory, which makes it easy to find and exclude files using flarcreate. In the following set of commands in italics, I create a subdirectory in /opt called flash_images and create a flash archive of the system in said directory. The "-x" argument is used to exclude the flash_images directory so that flash archive does not try to create an archive of itself. More than one directory can excluded, but one "-x" must precede each directory listed. Other notes about flarcreate arguments; -n indicates the title of the archive, -R indicates the top-level directory (in this case /), -a indicates the author, -c by itself is compressed format, -e indicates comments, and the last argument is the name of the file created. If the flarcreate command is run without the "-c" option/argument the flash image created will be 3.2 Gigabytes in size.

cd /opt
mkdir flash_images
flarcreate -n intel_D201GLY -R / -a "CJC" -c -e "Intel D201GLY with drivers" -x /opt/flash_images /opt/flash_images/intel_D201GLY_0.flar

Copy The Solaris Installation DVD To The Local Drive

For the same reasons mentioned earlier, create a working directory in the /opt account to copy the contents of the DVD. Insert the Solaris 10 installation DVD in the drive and allow the volume manager to mount it (if the volume manager is disabled, enable it using the command: svcadm restart volfs ).

cd /opt
mkdir sol10dvd
cd /cdrom/cdrom0
find . -print | cpio -dump /opt/sol10dvd/

The last command will take a long time, but please allow it to finish. To minimize the size of the ISO image, delete most of the unneeded Solaris software packages (SUNW*) and then copy the flash archive in to the new working directory.

cd /opt/sol10dvd/Solaris_10/Product
rm -rf SUNW*
cp /opt/flash_images/intel_D201GLY_0.flar /opt/sol10dvd/