Well it should be pretty straight forward installing OpenSolaris. But it’s not. Not for me anyway.

First off, it wouldn’t display on my Apple monitor.
I plugged it into my TV and at least I could see what was going on.
I thought it had hung during the boot from the DVD, but it just took ages. Eventually booted up and installed, but it wouldn’t boot from the hard drive. Bad PBR signal was the only message. Whatever that means. Tried a few more times (each time takes an hour). No luck. I was using release 85. Couldn’t get 95, so tried 93. This time it booted. All good. Set up the zfs pool, shared it, eventually mounted it on my Mac, fiddled around with the user ids and permissions, and could eventually read and write …. very slowly. About 2 MB/s. Other people get 40 MB/s and more depending on their network. So copying all my media would take 4 days. Okkaaaaayy.

Had to figure out if it was the network - don’t think it is, as writing a file direct to the drive gets 2 MB/s. So … the SATA driver? The drives in the right mode? IRQ conflicts? Nooooo idea. I’m learning all sorts of Solaris commands, but not really getting anywhere.

Google helped a little. So dude had the same hardware and same issue. He zeroed out the drives and reinstalled and it seemed to help. So I’m trying that right now. But it takes hours to zero out 3TB of drives.