Install Solaris w/o booting - possible?

[Gregg Mackenzie]

Question:  Is it possible to install Solaris without *booting*
           from the cdrom?

Scenario:  E3000, six SSA 114s, Solaris 2.5.1, boot disk is an
           SSA disk, mirrored in another SSA.  Two empty disks,
           either in the E3000, or in the SSAs...probably
           doesn't matter in this case.  Root disk filesystems
           need to be repartitioned.

           The system is a production system, eg. the smaller
           the outage window, the happier the customer will be.

I plan to upgrade to Solaris 2.6 by installing to one of the
empty disks, replicating the customizations and localizations
from the old root disk to the new root disk, and then changing
the appropriate NVRAM values.

What I'm wondering is, is there any way to do the bulk of the
installation without taking the system offline?  In other words,
can I manually run whatever install program(s) need to be run
against one of the empty disks as the target?

I seem to recall from the "olden days" (early Solaris 2.x, I
think) that one could run a program called 'suninstall' in such
a fashion--I only had to do it once, for a different reason, and
I was very much a novice at the time, so my recollection of it
may be faulty--but I don't see anything that resembles suninstall
on the 2.6 CD.

I can't imagine I'm the first one to ever think of doing this,
but I've searched the ssa-managers archives, sunsolve, and
dejanews and haven't found any similar scenarios.  The closest
I came was Sunsolve Infodoc 12161 for how to install 1.x and
2.x on the same machine.

Thanks for any help on this.

Gregg Mackenzie
gmackenz@ball.com