Ways to Test a Profile

pfinstall enables you to test a profile against:

• The system's disk configuration where pfinstall is being run.

• Other disk configurations by using a disk configuration file that represents a structure of a disk (for example, a disk's bytes/sector, flags, slices). See "SPARC: Creating Disk Configuration Files" for detailed information. You cannot use disk configuration files to test an upgrade profile; must test the profile against the system that you're going to upgrade, because you need to test the profile against the system's disk configuration and its currently installed software.

To successfully and accurately test a profile for a particular Solaris release, you must test a profile within the Solaris environment of the same release. For example, if you want to test a profile for Solaris 7, you have to run the pfinstall command on a system running Solaris 7.

So, on a system running Solaris 7, you can test Solaris 7 initial installation profiles. However, if you want to test a Solaris 7 upgrade profile on a system running a previous version of Solaris, or if you don't have a Solaris 7 system installed yet to test Solaris 7 initial installation profiles, you have to boot a system from a Solaris 7 CD image and temporarily create a Solaris 7 install environment. Then, you can run pfinstall in the Solaris 7 install environment to test the profiles you've created.

Creating a temporary Solaris 7 install environment involves booting a system from a Solaris 7 CD image (just as you would to install), answering any system identification questions, choosing the Solaris interactive installation program, and exiting out of the first screen that's presented. Then, from the shell, you can execute the pfinstall command.