Solaris

I had this working before. I have a 120GB disk with Solaris on the first primary partition, Fedore Core 3 on the second, Slackware on the third, And FreeBSD 5.3 on the 4th. Booting was handled by grub, and everything was working fine.

I decided to wipe everything out and start from scratch because I didn't like the way the partitions were layed out and I didn't like the way the Solaris slices were layed out within the Solaris partition.

So I repartitioned the disk and installed Solaris 10 on the first partition like I had it before. The install went fine, I booted it, logged in, made some minor changes, like clicking on the StarOffice icon to install that app, made a loghost or logname file in /etc, and enabling XDMCP from the graphical login configuration application. Then I rebooted.

Now it will not boot. I get this:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
<<< Current Boot Parameters >>>
Boot Path: /pci@0,0/pci-ide@7,1/ide@0/cmdk@0,0:a
Boot args:

Type b [file-name] [boot-flag] <ENTER> to boot with options
or i <ENTER> to enter boot interpreter
or <ENTER> to boot wih defaluts

<<< timeout in 5 seconds >>>

Select (b)oot or (i)nterpreter:

------------------------------------------------------------------------
If I let it time out, it gives this:

Run Error: File not found.
could not run now

then it resdisplays the screen.

I have only been playing with Solaris 10 for a very short time, so I am unfamiliar with it. How can I tell why "File not found"? And more importantly, what can I do to fix it?

Thanks.

I now know what's wrong, but I do not know how to fix it.

I made the following discoveries:

In the "intepreter" mode, I type "set" and can see all the variables. def_bootfile was set to 'now', which explains why I get the error message "can't run now".

I can boot the CDROM, and when I do, it's def_bootfile is 'kernel/unix'

So I changed the def_bootfile to 'kernel/unix' and I am able to boot.

However, every time I reboot, def_bootfile gets reset to 'now'. How to I make it permanent?

I'm not a Solaris person much anymore; on the face of it, it sound like you need to add a line in one of your boot scripts.

Maybe someone else has more details for you.....

Neo

Sounds like something to do with the boot.rc file. Around page 104 of the PDF and this might help you.

The problem and solution in Cliff's Notes format:

Problem: System would not boot. It gave Running "set" in the boot interpeter showed def_bootfile and rb_file were both set to "now".

According to /boot/solaris/boot.rc
So where was "now" coming from?

When I rebooted, I ran shutdown -r now. Well, in Solaris, "-r" is not a legal flag for the shutdown command, so I ran reboot now.

Solution: Do not specifiy "now" as an argument to the reboot command.

Dear lyonsd,

Good detective work!

Thanks for posting your solution for others.

In the future you could use one of the following
/usr/sbin/shutdown
/usr/sbin/halt
/usr/sbin/reboot
/usr/sbin/powerdown