Whenever I have to install Solaris (on SPARC), I never remember how to get it to boot from a cd. Sparc machines have their own bios system, which comes up as a this minimal, black on white serif-ey command prompt. You can type commands like:
boot cdrom
… and it’ll boot from the cd rom.
But how to get to the boot menu? Sun machines come with a special keyboard which has a extra row beyond the num pad. There’s a key there labeled STOP, and the ‘Sun Way’ of getting to the boot shell / bios prompt is to hit STOP + A at the same time. I’ve never got one of these keyboards around (we’re using a massive KVM thingy) so I’m forever googling to figure out how to send STOP – A to my Sparc box without having to get to the
So here’s what you do. In normal Solaris, just type :
init 0
And it’ll drop you to the boot prompt. From there go boot cdrom and you’re done.