I had a hard drive failure in a Sun Ultra 5. The old ide hard drive was a seagate 4.1 gb. I bought a ide seagate 15 gb for a replacement.
I thought all we had to do was boot on the installation cd, but I guess there is more to it.
The error we are getting is the drive size is not correct. When we run format it says it is formatted.
The procedure for drive replacement is clear as mud to me. Is the old drive size kept in nvram? Do we run metadb first?
what are the steps we need to do to prepare the drive for installing Solaris ? Help!

Thanks, your help is greatly appreciated.

Kashn.
I have replaced the Disk in my Ultra 5 and used the partition section of the install program with no problem. That said I used a 20G disk but I don't think their should be much difference. If needed you might boot from install cd and run fdisk on the /dev/dsk/***. This will update disk and SHOULD allow the install program to parition disk.

Hi George,
The sun is driving us crazy. This afternoon it was showing the drive as a 7.8 gb drive instead of 15 gb. it was reporting half the blocks. When format was run it said can not format use manufacturers formatter??
before that it suddenly stopped booting, pulled the scsi card and it started booting again??
We went ahead an used format/partition and let it partition it as a 7.8 gb, this stopped the size is wrong errors.
We have stopped for now, we will look at the fdisk in the morning.
Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.
thank you, thank you for your help

kshan

I just did this on our Ultra 5. I replaced the old 8G boot drive with a 40G IDE. No problems at all. >boot cdrom from the Solaris install disk and I went through the install process with zero problems.

Sounds like a hardware problem to me. Maybe your replacement drive is bad or jumpered wrong? Make sure it is jumpered as master and all other options or translations are turned off.
SCSI card?? Do you have SCSI drives as well as the IDE boot drive?

Sun PROM confusion.

I also have an Ultra5, I am guessing that you are booting and just trying to boot from CD. Have you tried doing a STOP+A "boot -d" to detect new devices. That may work, I found that this worked when I installed my 711 SCSI disk pack.

Also although the new drive has been formatted you will need to add it to the relavent METADB if you are planning on RAID configing it, also you will need to make a newfs using the newfs command.

Rob