crossbow discuss - Apr 2007 - Setting up OpenSolaris on HP C-class blades

Hi,

I was trying to setup Crossbow on a machine I can work with. After a few 
missteps, I finally got the developer edition installed on a Dell 
desktop only to find out that the network card is not supported.

Now, I am trying to install OpenSolaris developer edition on a HP 
c-class blade. I am getting this error

"Error 25: disk read error"

and the installation fails just after loading the kernel from Grub (I think)

I got good amount of help from Mike Lim, and he mentioned that the disk 
controller and the disks should be supported. This is what he mentioned 
in his mail

------------------------------------------------------------------------
 > These are brand new C-class blades from HP. Some of the details are 
here http://kabru.eecs.umich.edu/bin/view/Main/BladeSystem. Basically, 
each blade has
 >
 > (1) Smart Array E200i disk controller (64MB read cache)
 > (2) Two 146GB SAS 10Krpm small-form factor (SFF) hard disk drives

The Solaris installation *should* see the 2 SAS disks, as I know Solaris
supports this for our x4100.

 > When I tried to install OpenSolaris, I don''t remember the exact 
error, but it was trying to find disk label. At that time, I did a 
Google search and found nothing useful. The Solaris manual suggests to 
write a disk label on it. I found some info online about sformat, but 
these systems have Linux right now, and I don''t know what to do.

Here''s a thread about some others which have run into the same problem.
The last post has the best information.

   open a terminal window after booting from the solaris install CD/DVD

   #format -e                 - this is for expert mode
   #label                     - select SMI
      ... no
      ... no                  - say no to the 2 questions

   reboot

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-187407.html%3C/t-334150.html

We really need to write a Linux program to do this :)
------------------------------------------------------------------------

However, I can''t get a terminal unless I start the installation. I am 
not sure how to get it into the expert mode. He is currently on 
vacation, so can you guys help me resolve this problem ?

Thanks,
Pradeep