partitions disappear on B100s

[iamchris]

Since the chassis has no CDROM, and no way to mount a drive except for network mounts, I have no way of getting a stage3 tarball on the B100s except for taking the drive out of the blade and hooking it to another computer to copy the files.

so...

I removed the drive, and hooked it up to another server running x86_64 linux. I partitioned the drive, formatted the partitions, copied and unpacked the stage3 and portage snapshot tarballs on the drive, and copied over the latest kernel with cassini drivers. My plan was to boot with the tftp image, mount up the drive, chroot, and continue installation from there.

I ran into a problem. This is my first venture into any architecture outside of an x86. I have /no idea/ what might have gone wrong. There must be some type of incompatibility going on with the IDE controller on the B100s such that the partitions I made and formatted while the drive was connected to another machine aren't visible to the blade.

Googling gives no joy.

I would be very greatful to any of the experienced sparc people willing to lend a hand.

[Plugin_baby]

You need a sun disklabel, your sparc doesn't recognize your current partition layout.
Read this part of the handbook for details:
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-sparc.xml?full=1#book_part1_chap4

Have you tried the netboot howto?

[iamchris]

Thank you thank you thank you. I had no idea about the Sun scheme.