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.

[sevan]

I hit this issue last night on a newer lunchbox machine to the IPX (SPARCclassic) attempting to install Solaris 8 on to initially 20GB disk, then again 8GB. What's actually happening is the installer is going through and running newfs but because the large disk capacity, its default settings are incorrect. If you run it manually it'll complain that the fragment size need to be changed from 1024 to 4096. With a 6GB disk it doesn't complain and works through. Didn't try 7GB.
The advice for pining the C/H/S setting in bluescsi.ini seems like worth a try and next on my todo, to see if I can get a stable setup. Been having lots of issues on the v2026.03.01 firmware.