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I have an old Sun Blade 1500, with a Ultrasparc IIIi 1.5 GHz, 2GB ECC RAM. SunOS 5.10, ufs filesystem. The hardware (MB, HDD and video card) is failing on me and I'm searching for a way to emulate it on x86 hardware. I have a DD raw copy of the HDD that I tried to mount it on Linux but i'm getting: disk cannot be accessed. I read about emulating it with qemu but I don't have much experience with Sun/Solaris and Linux environments. Has anyone tried and succeeded emulating a system like this? Thank you

alanc
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Vasile G
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  • What have you tried so far? What mount command did you use, and what was its output? Linux itself can _read_ ufs. Note that you generally want to specify an offset (to the partition itself) when trying to mount a raw disk image. Further note: Sun uses a BSD-style disklabel, rather than the typical Linux MBR or GPT, which may or may not make things more difficult. – Fox Feb 15 '17 at 09:12
  • and emulating SPARC hardware on x86 is likely doomed. Buying a Sun Blade 1500 on eBay or whatever would probably be your best option. – jlliagre Feb 15 '17 at 09:23
  • @jlliagre Qemu's SPARC emulation is actually pretty good... – Stephen Kitt Feb 15 '17 at 10:47
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    @StephenKitt I have no doubt SPARC CPU emulation by qemu is good. The issue here is not only emulating CPU but a full SPARC server with its devices close enough for being able to boot a disk image, especially by someone with no experience with Sun/Solaris. – jlliagre Feb 15 '17 at 10:52
  • @jlliagre good point, device tree discrepancies can usually be resolved during the boot but you do need to know your way around Qemu, OBP and Solaris... – Stephen Kitt Feb 15 '17 at 11:04
  • @StephenKitt That's why I'm asking for help :). After this I'll be more experienced :D. Since I already have a raw image of the real machine it should not be so hard to use it – Vasile G Feb 15 '17 at 13:35
  • @Fox [screen capture](https://plus.google.com/118166639265984948677/posts/2WQPcicjhAJ) This is the partition table of the image that I created from the original HDD. I don't know how to define the virtual machine in qemu to work with it. – Vasile G Feb 16 '17 at 07:30
  • I have Sun machines, but no experience with Qemu. If you need to mount the raw image, `mount -o offset=2149539840 mountpoint`, for example, should mount (possibly read-only) the "SunOS root" partition. That's (start sector) * 512. You could then mount the rest at their respective mount points below that and have the whole file tree accessible. I'm not opposed to learning Qemu to help, but all my Suns use SCSI drives, so I don't have a way of offloading an image to try. – Fox Feb 17 '17 at 00:14

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