[OpenIndiana-discuss] OI_151a7 install grumble

[Jim Klimov]

Hello Reginald,

I'll toss a few ideas below, hopefully they'll work and help you ;)

On 2013-01-31 18:25, Reginald Beardsley wrote:
> I don't want to connect to the Internet w/ the system, so adding packages requires cloning the repository.  I'll probably have to do that eventually, but for now ...

You can also use tarballs of the repo, or rsync the repo onto a
removable drive and carry over to this box sneaker-net style.

> I'm going to try tricking it by forming a mirror w/ a 128 GB slice, detaching the oversize slice, relabeling and then reforming the mirror.  May not work, but it's worth a try.

I'm not sure I get your idea right... if you plan on creating a 2Tb
rpool, then adding 128Gb as a mirror, and then detach 2Tb, I guess
creation of the mirror will fail and the plan won't work. What am I
missing? ;)

> It would all be simple if the installer would allow using existing labels and pools.  Just run the shell to set things up and then start the installer.
>
> Sigh...

+1 ;)

As an option, you might be able to use the GUI installer to create
a 128Gb MBR partition with a single Solaris slice, install the OS
easily from the LiveCD, and then expand the MBR partition with the
(g)parted or plain fdisk, and add the slice for the raidz data pool.

Alternately, you might make the needed layout on another disk, and
use the standard "prtvtoc|fmthard" trick to carry over the SMI label
onto the drive with the OS.

Or just follow your idea with the mirror to replicate the completed
installation (into a 128Gb rpool partition) onto a disk with the
finished layout you deem correct - and then recycle (fully relabel)
the disk you used initially. This last routine would probably be
most simple to implement and presents the least surprises - and
coupled with "prtvtoc|fmthard" it would allow your four disks to
have identical partition/slice labelling. Make sure to align the
partition and slice sizes (notably starting sector numbers) with
your drive HW sector size, i.e. starting offfsets should be all
divisible by 8 for a 4K-sectored drive.

And when you're finished pouring the pools from drive to drive,
don't forget to installgrub onto all four of them.

HTH,
//Jim Klimov