I figured I'd make a post about my adventures about upgrading my 110 Mhz Sparc 5 w/ a new 18 gig drive & attempt w/ a 36 gig drive. I originally loaded my Sparc 5 over 6 years ago. It was running happily w/ a 4 gig & a 2 gig drive. Space was a little tight, but it ran like a dream. A few months ago, I noticed the 4 gig drive was starting to get loud & I started getting those dreadful errors in /usr/adm/messages about drive failures. :-( So while behind the scenes, I quietly moved everything over to my HP Gecko running NEXTSTEP 3.3 & used a NFS share from my one of Sun boxes for everything under /www. :-) You really couldn't tell any difference except for the WebDAV drive didn't work. Anyway, after everything was safely moved off the Sparc 5, I started working in my spare time to get a new drive installed. I started out trying to use a 36 gig drive w/ 7 4 gig partitions. I booted into single user mode, created a disktab entry & was able to format the new drive w/ no problems. I could mount the 4 gig partitions, use dump/restore to copy everything over etc, but the system wouldn't boot from the drive even though all data was intact. I found this extremely frustrating. ;-) So, I tried an 18 gig drive w/ 4 gig partitions also. Again this formatted fine, data copied fine, but again failed to boot. I tried a few different drives just to make sure it wasn't a drive problem. No success. So last night I figured I'd give it a shot w/ 2 gig partitions. Actually 1.9 gig partitions to be exact, & using the same dump/restore procedures I'd used many times in the past finally worked. :-) It seems my Sparc 5 don't like using 4 gig partitions to boot off of running OPENSTEP 4.2. The system is running happily w/ 7 1.9 gig partitions. The new drive is alot faster/quieter & I have alot more room. It's has a 1.9 gig custom swapdisk & I have 1.9 gig of space dedicated to my WebDAV drive. :-) Overall, I'm extremely happy w/ the upgrade. The system performance is quite a difference speed wise. I might try again in the future using a 2 gig root partition & several 4 gig partitions, but right now, the system is 100% again. Anyone w/ a 110 Mhz Sparc 5 had problems using boot partitions bigger than 2 gigs running OPENSTEP? I have another 170 mhz Sparc 5 w/ 2 36 gig drives running Solaris 9 just fine. It could be the OBP version on my 110Mhz Sparc 5, but I'm pretty sure it's the latest for the system. Take care.
I will check my main SS5 when I get home, but I thought it had a 4 gig partition. It is only a 4 gig drive though, so basically just one partition. Will check and report back later.