[rescue] 10GB emulated drive and disk layout.

[Andrew Back]

Thanks to all who replied with suggestions.

Following what Mouse suggested, I recreated the partition table and then manually created an FS on each slice and checked the table again, before proceeding to the next and repeat. I fully expected things to go wrong at g or h — and more likely, the latter — but this time it didn't.

The only difference here was manually running newfs vs. suninstaller doing this.

So this time I selected Custom rather than Quick install, and opted to leave data (filesystems) intact. And I was able to proceed to installing the system.

Hence it's not clear to me what the issue was. The suninstaller looked to run newfs just like I did — e.g. rather than mkfs — but in doing so it appeared to repeatedly trash the partition table. I am now kind of half expecting corruption at some point when writing to g/h, so maybe I should dd a bunch of large files just to make sure.

Andrew

On 24/01/2026 20:47, Todd Vernon via rescue wrote:

> If you really get stuck you’re welcome to grab one of my existing images and use it, or at least install over the existing partitions.
>
> https://www.oldsilicon.com/workstationdiskimages
>
> Good luck !
>
> T
>
> ---
> Todd Vernon
> Entrepreneur | Investor
> Email: todd at toddvernon.com
> LinkedIn: [toddvernon](https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddvernon/)
> On Jan 24, 2026 at 11:05 AM -0700, vom513 via rescue [<rescue at sunhelp.org>](mailto:rescue at sunhelp.org), wrote:
>
>> I usually run NetBSD and it fabricates geometry and generally “just works”.
>>
>> When I do run any Sun OS on my machines, I follow this guide in terms of sizing and disk formatting:
>>
>> https://learn.adafruit.com/build-your-own-sparc-with-qemu-and-solaris?view=all#create-a-disk-image
>>
>> This will get you a 9.1G image. The size should be 9663676416 (dd from /dev/zero to make a blank image for the ZS). Then in format:
>>
>> (Your output might vary depending on the version of SunOS / Solaris you are using. For example the first option of “0” - I think I instead choose 16 “other”.)
>>
>> Specify disk (enter its number): 0
>> Specify disk type (enter its number): 16
>> Enter number of data cylinders: 16381
>> ...defaults are fine here...
>> Enter number of heads: 16
>> ...
>> Enter number of data sectors/track: 63
>> ...
>> Enter disk type name (remember quotes): Qemu9G
>>
>> After doing this I am always able to install Solaris with no issues. Also to be clear - using these parameters - I don’t have any geometry config in zuluscsi.ini.
>> _______________________________________________
>> rescue list - http://sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue_sunhelp.org
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