Well, I didn't "do nothing". I attempted to fsck /var but it responded that it couldn't since /var was already mounted as read-only. I don't know why it was mounted read only. I can only assume (which is why I'm asking here) that due to the initial problem, it couldn't remount read-write.

I thought the initial process of mounting disks, mounted root and var in read-only, fscked them, then remounted them to read-write before mounting the rest of the slices.

Correction would be appreciated of course.

The initial problem was that the system wasn't able to create utmp, possibly because /var was not able to be remounted read-write (again, assuming my comment above is true).

So my steps were to break the mirror so that I had two separate disks, reboot it to just a single, non disk suite controlled disk, fsck the other disk and bring the mirror back.

I cleared /etc/system, changed the md entries in /etc/vfstab back to mounting the disk rather than mounting the metadisks, fixed eeprom so that it booted from the second disk and booted the system.

Since it should be booting from a clean, non SDS controlled disk, it should have booted successfully. I got puzzled when I received the exact same error.

I don't know. See my theory above. Since I don't have a Sun contract here at work (AIX/Red Hat shop), I can't check some of the deeper knowledge available within Sunsolve that I had available when I was working at a Sun shop.

I don't know how -n would have worked (reply 'n' to all prompts) and it wouldn't have occurred to me to try it. Can you explain further how it might have helped?

Well yea That's what I was trying to do. I thought, perhaps in error, that getting it mounted without disk suite would let me fsck the other disk and then boot to repaired disk to get the system back up. I could then re mirror the disk afterwards.

Hence the questions. Thanks for taking the time though.

Carl