If you told me this was a real conversation, I'd believe it.

Tech Support Call (Flash).

Worth the laugh.

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Firewire and Solaris HOWTO

I have a Belkin Firewire PCI card in a Solaris 10/Intel box with an external enclosure containing a 120GB IDE disk in it. Solaris recognizes the device automatically via the scsa1394 driver, but it doesn't do anything with it out of the box.

A grep for 'scsa' in dmesg output shows:

genunix: [ID 936769 kern.info] scsa13940 is /pci@0,0/....snip
genunix: [ID 408114 kern.info] /pci@0,0/...snip... (scsa13940) online
scsi: [ID 193665 kern.info] sd1 at scsa13940: target 0 lun 0

After a bunch of perusing at useless documentation and finding nothing useful (like iPod on Solaris 10), I fell into the following strategy.

Comment out the following line vold.conf:

#use rmdisk drive /dev/rdsk/c*s2 dev_rmdisk.so rmdisk%d

(The man page for scsa1394 has a typo as it says to comment out rmscsi.)

Restart vold to pick up that change:

/etc/init.d/volmgt stop
/etc/init.d/volmgt start

Ensure that it still sees it via rmformat:

# rmformat
Looking for devices...
   1. Logical Node: /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0p0
      Physical Node: /pci@0,0/...snip.../disk@0,0
      Connected Device: WDC WD12 00JB-00GVA0          
      Device Type: Removable

Run fdisk on the partition to ensure that there is a 'Solaris' partition there. (Note the logical node displayed in rmformat.)

fdisk /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0p0

Then, run fmthard to dump the disk characteristics (format doesn't work):

fmthard -i -n "" /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0s2 > /tmp/label.dat

I then copied the line for the '2' slice to '0' with the following changes:

0           3       00              0               185566815

(The value in last column should be the same as the last number in slice 2.)

Then, I reloaded the format tabel as follows:

fmthard -s /tmp/label.dat -n "disk" /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0s2

Then, I ran newfs:

newfs /dev/rdsk/c2t0d0s0

Mount:

mount /dev/dsk/c2t0d0s0 /mnt/sda

Voila. I think. Haven't rebooted to see if it busted the rest of the partitions on that drive yet. (Don't really care if it does.)

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