Now that I finally got my mini thumper up and online, it’s time pull everything from my previous  backup drive.  The problem is that it’s a USB drive with an ext3 partition on it.  I did a little googling and found several references to using the belenix FSWpart and FSWfsmisc packages, with this one being the most helpful.

My only problem was that when I ran prtpart, it only showed disk information for my non-USB drives.  I could see that the drive was recognized by looking in syslog:

root@silo:~# cat /var/adm/messages
Mar 14 12:03:36 silo usba: [ID 349649 kern.info]        SanDisk U3 Cruzer Micro 0774920CB281D664
Mar 14 12:03:36 silo genunix: [ID 936769 kern.info] scsa2usb0 is /pci@0,0/pci1462,7418@1d,3/storage@1
...

So, I dug around a bit, trying to look for various names in /dev/rdsk that were in the above output when I stumbled across the fact that everything in /dev/rdsk is a symlink.  So I did a quick grep:

root@silo:~# ls -al /dev/rdsk/ | grep /pci@0,0/pci1462,7418@1d,3/storage@1
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root root  64 2010-03-14 12:03 c11t0d0p0 -> ../../devices/pci@0,0/pci1462,7418@1d,3/storage@1/disk@0,0:q,raw
lrwxrwxrwx   1 root root  64 2010-03-14 12:03 c11t0d0p1 -> ../../devices/pci@0,0/pci1462,7418@1d,3/storage@1/disk@0,0:r,raw
....

Aha! Now I know what the device name is, so I can use prtpart to figure out what to mount:

root@silo:~# prtpart /dev/rdsk/c11t0d0p0 -ldevs
Fdisk information for device /dev/rdsk/c11t0d0p0

** NOTE **
/dev/dsk/c11t0d0p0      - Physical device referring to entire physical disk
/dev/dsk/c11t0d0p1 - p4 - Physical devices referring to the 4 primary partitions
/dev/dsk/c11t0d0p5 ...  - Virtual devices referring to logical partitions

Virtual device names can be used to access EXT2 and NTFS on logical partitions

/dev/dsk/c11t0d0p1      Linux native

And mount it:

root@silo:~# mkdir /mnt/linux
root@silo:~# mount -F ext2fs /dev/dsk/c11t0d0p1 /mnt/linux
root@silo:~# ls /mnt/linux/
bin  dev  etc  home  initrd  lib  lost+found  media  mnt  proc  root  sbin  sys  tmp  usr  var  www

Most of the assembly went smoothly.  You do have to pull the motherboard out to get the CF drive into its slot.  In order to maneuver it out, you have to unclip the SATA cables and unscrew the VGA connector.

You can see the SATA cables snaking up the left and top and the VGA connector is in the lower right (blue).  The CF slot is just left of center at the bottom of the picture.  Here’s a picture with the drive and RAM installed.

The other issue I ran into was related to the optical drive bay.  My first drive slid in and mounted fine in the HD bay, but I was stuck without brackets to properly secure the second drive in the 5.25 inch bay.  I could have just put it in and held it with one screw, but after figuring that this is my backup server, I opted to head to Best Buy to pick up the brackets.

When I got there, I was informed that they don’t carry them any more and that I would have to pay a visit to Fry’s.  Well, I hate going to Fry’s more than most bad things in life, so I called it a day and decided to figure it out later.  Then, earlier this week, Sara and I were walking by a little local computer shop named *techquest.  The proprietor was able to dig up a pair of brackets, so I bought them from him.

Yesterday, I finished assembling the hardware and then spent a while trying to figure out how to get it to boot OpenSolaris from the USB drive I had created.

The first problem was that I couldn’t get into the Wind BIOS.  I could see it flash something on the screen after POST beeping, but it was cleared far too fast for me to get any information.  After rebooting a few times and only getting a few words, I turned my iPhone video camera on it and was able to finally read the information with a well timed pause.

The rest of my issues revolved around the unique arrangement of boot options in the BIOS and having to remove the stupid U3 stuff from the Cruzer so that it behaved like a simple USB disk, but soon enough I was installing OpenSolaris.

The little box now sits in my entertainment center, ready for me to start transferring data to it.