Creating a Flash archive

1. If the root disk is encapsulated by Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM), unencapsulate it before continuing.

2. I recommend booting to single-user mode, as you generally do not want to include NFS mounts or other file systems mounted in later run levels as part of your Flash archive.

#reboot -- -s
3. Create the Flash archive.

flarcreate -n name -a author -S -c archive_name
eg: flarcreate -n "Solaris 9 image" -a "shiroy" /var/tmp/sol8.archive

Notes:
flarcreate will not determine the size of the archive beforehand when using the -S flag. Personally, I have seen flarcreate take an inordinate amount of time calculating the size of the archive.The -c flag enables archive compression via the compress command.

4. If applicable, re-encapsulate the rootdisk with the vxdiskadm command. Reboot the system for the encapsulation to take effect.