I see your post and find it disappointing that you still have no replies. I haven't tried to reply before because I am an expert on SPARC solaris and I have only played around in the Solaris x86 world. I have no production experience in the Solaris x86 world. However, Oracle/Sun have always prided themselves on the few operational differences between their SPARC and x86 product so maybe I can write something useful.

MODERATOR'S PLEASE NOTE THAT WE REALLY NEED YOUR Solaris x86 EXPERT TO PASS COMMENT ON WHAT FOLLOWS BECAUSE IT MIGHT BE RUBBISH IN THE X86 WORLD. I WILL INSERT A (??) WHEN I'M NOT SURE.

Okay, all that said here goes..........

To move platforms like this is a fairly major engineering job. My normal approach on SPARC is to boot from cdrom media, configure my hard drives, make filesystems of appropriate size and restore my ufsdumps from tape or, more often, a remote nfs mount.

When that's done there are a number of things that must be fixed before attempting to reboot. These are:-

1. The bootblock, the content of which varies with the hardware platform. Need to write out the correct one. (??) But here you use grub??

2. Check the /etc/system file (??) suits the platform.

3. Check the /etc/vfstab file (??) suits the platform and devices paths.

4. Remake all device paths (eg. /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s1). The device paths represent the only connection between software and the actual hardware. If the O/S tries to mount /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s1 and the disk is not on the end of it you are stuffed. Therefore, you remove the devices and remake them all......


Having booted from CD mount your harddisk root filesystem under /a (??)

Code:

rm -f /a/dev/rdsk/c*
rm -f /a/dev/dsk/c*
rm -f /a/dev/cfg/c*
devfsadm -r /a -p /a/etc/path_to_inst

(??)

Now double check /etc/vfstab looks right now that you have new devices.
Use the format (??) command to see what device names your disks are on and ensure /etc/vfstab is correct for this platform. When you are sure take the system down.

Now all the devices are new make sure that you tell Solaris to reconfigure the whole thing by using the -r switch the FIRST time you boot.

Code:

 
boot -r

(??)

You could even use boot -rv (??) to get a verbose boot to see exactly what goes on.

The -r switch will warn Solaris that a reconfigure is needed. go make a coffee and let Solaris sort everything out.

Right, that's all. We need comments asap from Solaris x86 experts whether they see rubbish written above. Positive comments if you can't see anything wrong will increase confidence.

No guarantees given.