Installing Solaris Express 11 on a USB stick

Question

Hi,
I am in the process of building a resilient development/testing lab server using 4 SATA disks in a RAIDZ configuration, I want to boot the host SE 11 o/s off a internal USB stick to manage this server, so my question is how do I go about installing SE 11 on a USB stick (persistent not a live image).
Perhaps naively I assumed this would be easy, as Solaris would just see the flash storage as any other storage. What I have attempted is running the live CD, it detected my USB stick and I continued to run through the installer, I choose a "Entire Disk" install, it took an absolute age in doing this, in the process of installing a message/error appeared about the zpool (sorry I should of noted it), but it continued, once complete, I changed the bios option to boot from USB, this resulted in booting what looked like a successful install, but it just sat at the Oracle progress screen about 20 minutes, the one prior to loading the GNOME login page.
I've googled this to no avail, I'm having a hard time in believing nobody has ever tried this before, perhaps for good reason that I seem to be unaware of.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Best Regards,
Jana

Answer 1

There are varieties of methods and ways, options i.e.
1.) From Microsoft Windows (NT i.e. XP (5.x), 6 (Vista) & 7) with the "Open Solaris Live USB creator"; this reported works! Easily and quickly with a graphical user interface transferring *.usb and or *.iso files upon flash drives and memory cards bootably, 'select device / drive and file and click start ; from http://devzone.sites.pid0.org/OpenSolaris/opensolaris-liveusb-creator
2.) With 'usbcopy' under Solaris 11 / Open Solaris and or the 'installgrub' command.; from http://www.milax.org/files/
For an example, from within (Open) Solaris a command statement (without the quotes) such as;
In these 'device' is substitute for the actual special device (file) assigned to the usb flash drive, again as an example if it were assigned "c0t2d0s3" and or "/dev/rdsk/c0t2d0s3"; its device "/dev/rdsk/c0t2d0 with two additional, 2 place fields denotating specifics, such as 's3' for a slice or 'p0' the entire flash device for example purpose, partitioning
#> "fdisk -d /dev/rdsk/'device'" however to partition, and leave space for other partitions
or
#> "fdisk -d -B /dev/rdsk/'device'" for a partition using the entire space available;
then
#> "dd if=sol-11-exp--live-x86.usb of=/dev/rdsk/'device bs=512" for example to copy the Solaris 'image' to the flash drive
and then finally, finishing it, installing the grub boot loader, to boot and or 'start' from. i.e. load and initialize (executing) the operating system, would be;
#> "installgrub -m /boot/grub/stage1 /boot/grub/stage2 /dev/rdsk/'device'" would install grub to the 'device' for 'booting', having it startable ; and or plainly "installgrub -m /boot/grub/stage1 /boot/grub/stage2 /dev/rdsk/c0t2d0s3"
Hopelly helpfull, GOD willing.
Edited by: Ariel (אריאל) on Jul 21, 2011 1:09 AM
Edited by: Ariel (אריאל) on Aug 15, 2011 9:00 AM