UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

I have suns machine that holds two hard drives. I only used one. I tryed to make a lan network with my windows xp. When I tryed to restart the machine it wanted to a password. when before I just typed root to log in. So i edited the etc dir. big mistake. So now the machine will not read the hard drive at all. It will not read the other hard drive also. What do I need to do to fix the machine.

When you edited the /etc directory, did you save it as a file?


Try booting single user from cdrom. Mount up the / partion of the disk on /mnt. You then need to cd /mnt/lost+found. See it the system moved the directory there. If it did, move it back to /mnt/etc. Then run fsck on that disk. Shutdown and boot into single user off the disk.

(I was just looking at your post again - is this a X86 system? If yes, then I don't know if my post will help you - I don't believe you can boot single user from the Solaris X86 cd.)

(Another note - you can boot from cdrom for X86)
Booting Single-User From CDROM Using the Device Configuration Assistant (DCA) on the Hard Drive:
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1). Power the system on.

2). Insert the correct version Solaris Software cdrom for your system.

OPTIONAL: If there is a boot loader in operation on your system, select the Solaris partition as the partition to boot from.

3). After the "Solaris Secondary Boot Loader" and "Running Device Configuration Assistant" messages appear, hit the 'esc' key where prompted to do so.

4). At the "DCA intro screen" hit F2 (F2_Continue).

5). At the "list of devices found" hit F2 (F2_Continue).

6). At the "list of available boot devices" select the CDROM as the device from which to boot a Solaris kernel.

7). At the screen where you are prompted to select 1, 2, or 3 for what type of install you wish to do, enter 'b -s' instead of a number.

This will bring the system up to single-user mode from the cdrom.


Booting Single-User From the CDROM Using the Device Configuration Assistant (DCA) Floppy:
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1). With the power on, insert DCA floppy, then the correct version Solaris Software cdrom for your system.

2). At the "DCA intro screen" hit F2 (F2_Continue).

3). At the "list of devices found" hit F2 (F2_Continue).

4). At the "list of available boot devices" select the CDROM as the device from which to boot a Solaris kernel.

5). At the screen where you are prompted to select 1, 2, or 3 for what type of install you wish to do enter 'b -s' instead of a number.

This will bring the system up to single-user mode from the cdrom. It should be noted that even though there are fewer steps, this normally takes much longer than running the DCA from the hard drive.


Booting Single-User From the Hard drive:
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1). Power the system on.

OPTIONAL: If there is a boot loader in operation on your system, select the Solaris partition as the partition to boot from.

2). Wait until the prompt for booting "with options" or "into the interpreter". At this point enter 'b -s' and hit [Return].

This will bring the system up to single-user mode from the hard drive.


Booting Single-User From the Hard Drive Using the DCA Floppy:
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1). With the power on, insert DCA floppy,

2). At the DCA intro screen hit F2 (F2_Continue).

3). At the "list of devices found" hit F2 (F2_Continue).

4). At the "list of available boot devices" select the hard drive with the root partiton on it as the device from which to boot a Solaris kernel.

5). Wait until the prompt for "booting with options" (b) or "into the interpreter" (i). At this point enter 'b -s' and hit [Return].
Note that you only have 5 seconds to do this.

This will bring the system up to single-user mode from the hard drive.

what did you edit in the /etc/ directory? since you say your machine wont read the drive, 2 things come to mind, either, 1. you didnt shutdown the computer properly, resulting in a corrupt filesystem, or 2. you edited the file /etc/fstab and messed up your mount points.
if the case is number 2, then it shouldnt be too hard to fix, what OS are you running on the machine? if you bought it in a store, it might have come with a sort of "rescue disk" where you will boot from that floppy and you may be able to manually mount the drive and restore your /etc/fstab file. if its the first one, a corrupt filesystem, then fsuck (hopefully) would be able to clear things up when you boot the machine. what happens when you boot? provide more info including your OS and what exactly you did, and what happens when you try to boot, and we can help you better.