First, the disclaimer, I haven't tried either method below, these are just
possible solutions that came to mind.  Possibilities:

1. The E450 has 2 disk slots, if possible, instead of copying and reburning
the Solaris CD, try installing a disk with 'gzip' on it in the 2nd slot and
mounting the disk under single user mode.  Given that most people don't have
built disks sitting around waiting for a time like this, you have 2 options
to do this: a. Steal one from an 'unimportant' system; b. take a spare disk
and format / 'newfs' it then copy 'gzip' on another system.  Might be faster
than copying everything to another system off the CD and adding gzip then
reburning the CD.

2. If you have the spare emtpy disk to do #1, you might also consider
restoring from tape to a disk using 'dd' then taking that disk to another
system that has 'gzip' and uncompressing it to the same disk.  Then take
that disk and put back into the broke system along with the system disk onto
which you want to restore the data then run 'ufsrestore' and specify the
newly created, uncompressed disk file instead of stdout.

Just some random thoughts.

Todd Urie

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Andrew A. Raines [mailto:drew AT phg.mc.vanderbilt DOT edu]
> Sent: Friday, May 09, 2003 2:12 PM
> To: amanda-users AT amanda DOT org
> Subject: Solaris bootstrap failing without gzip
> 
> 
> I'm trying to restore / and /usr from tape.  My AMANDA printout
> tells me to do:
> 
>    dd if=/dev/rmt/0n bs=32k skip=1 | /gzip -cd | ufsrestore -if -
> 
> That's dandy, and I use it all the time for other filesystems.
> However, because it's the system drive that failed in my E450, I'm
> in single-user mode from the Solaris CD.  There ain't no gzip.
> There ain't no amrestore.
> 
> Every time I run this:
> 
>    # mt rewind
>    # mt fsf 5
>    # dd if=/dev/rmt/0n bs=32k skip=1 | ufsrestore -rvf -
> 
> I get ``Volume not in dump format.''  That doesn't really surprise
> me, because the data is compressed on disk and must be uncompressed
> before ufsrestore can ``understand'' it.
> 
> So my question is, what can I do?  I've never had to bootstrap a
> system from tape like this.
> 
> I would really appreciate any suggestions.  This is an extremely
> critical system.
> 
> -- 
> Drew
> (34)3-5853
>