Tuesday, 6 June 2006
“Fun” OS X disk image bug
So I was trying to install OpenSolaris on a CD-less SPARC system using an OS X machine as an install server (because said machine is barfing under FreeBSD, and I’m trying to figure out if it was a hardware problem).
After downloading the DVD image in four pieces, concatenating them together, and mounting it, I think I may have run into some weird disk imaging or filesystem bug on OS X. It’s really rather scary.
% uname -a
Darwin bookworm.local 8.6.0 Darwin Kernel Version 8.6.0: Tue Mar 7 16:58:48 PST
2006; root:xnu-792.6.70.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc
% hdid sol-nv-b40-sparc-dvd.iso
/dev/disk2 /Volumes/SOL_11_SPARC
% cp /Volumes/SOL_11_SPARC/Solaris_11/Tools/add_install_client ./one
% disktool -e disk2 0
[...]
***Disk Ejected('disk2')
% hdid sol-nv-b40-sparc-dvd.iso
/dev/disk2 /Volumes/SOL_11_SPARC
% cp /Volumes/SOL_11_SPARC/Solaris_11/Tools/add_install_client ./two
% diff one two
Binary files one and two differ
% file one two
one: data
two: data
add_install_client is supposed to be a shell script. A few times running strings on it, I found some OS X filesystem bits, for example:
% strings add_install_client [...] ntpd snmpd Starter RetroRun rter crashreporterd [...] tarter apcupsd arter serialnumberd ARDHelper zsh: 697 bus error strings add_install_client
No time to debug further at the moment, but… yuck.
6:54 AM
The problem appears to be that the DVD image was in five pieces, not four—it was incomplete. Still seems like a real problem that it was giving me random data from memory, though.