Solaris

Yea but....yea but....

You suspect that the OBP is too early a version for Solaris 10 so, as discussed, try an earlier version of Solaris; Solaris 9 or Solaris 8 and see what happens. If that diagnosis is correct there's no point is trying later versions of Solaris.

My thinking on this problem is:

1. Bad media (we've probably eliminated that one)
2. Bad cable connection to cdrom drive (reseat it)
3. faulty cdrom drive (there's nothing special about it so hook in another one temporarily for testing)
4. Possibly a RAM memory problem (though unlikely)
5. OBP is too old (either update or install earlier Solaris version to start)

What happened about trying another Solaris 9 (or Solaris 8)?

That does not sound like 50%, it sounds like you barely are getting started. Boot the install cd into single user mode, run format and look at the disks. Look for a tiny partition. If find one scribble on it with dd or something. Run newfs on your other partitions. Then try the install process again.

The install process examines your system to see if you already have Solaris, if so it want to offer you a choice of wipedown or update. If the system was software mirrored it will activate the mirrors. If it gets stuck it this state it stays stuck. This happened to me on a v240 and scribbling on the disk allowed the install to proceed.

Perderabo has just made a very valid point.

What happened when you booted single user from CD with:

Code:

 
 boot cdrom -s

Did that get you all the way to a # prompt? Or did that get stuck too?

Ok so after much fiddling and reseating the cdrom drive I got it to install Solaris 10 update 11. I then proceed to update the obp from version 4.7 to 4.22 with out any issue.

However after i restarted the machine it does not seem to boot from disk as it just has the spinning slash mark after giving it the boot command. I suspect maybe the prom update broke some auto boot variables configured during install so i reinstalled again. And again i cant boot from the disk. The disk light is blinking but it seems to just sit there.

---------- Post updated at 09:01 PM ---------- Previous update was at 08:59 PM ----------

thanks for your help so far

That sounds like some progress on the original issue.

The first thing I'd do is test booting into single user

Code:

boot cdrom -s

to check that the box is capable of booting that Solaris version with the new OBP. If that gets to a # prompt then good. You could then run 'format' to see what drives are recognised and mount a hard disk filesystem under /a to view it.


You may have installed Solaris but not to the drive that the System Controller is trying to boot from.

You could just try:

Code:

SC> boot disk0

or

Code:

SC> boot disk1

or disk2, etc.

How many hard drives are in your box?

Another test might be to pull out all the disks except the first one and then install Solaris on that.

Thanks for your help everyone so far,

Yes we are slowly making progress, as hobby this machine throws plenty of challenges but it feels rewarding when something works.

RE: single user mode does work when from the cd, i guess reseating the cdrom dive (and burning new disks) fixed the install issue (although even when it did not istall i could go into single user mode of the cd)

The prom update (4.7 -> 4.22) was successful and im at the latest version i can get my hands on (4.34.C only fixes some minor pic card issues, but i cant find this one so i doesnt matter)

Turns out the booting issue is actually from a bad disk, go figure. I let the machine run the entire night and when i went to bed there still was the spining slash and when i woke it had a whole bunch of read errors on the screen.

So for now new disk and try again

With regards the suspected hard disk, if you boot into single user from the CD/DVD and run 'format' you will find a "analyse" option in there. Select the bad drive and analyse it. That will certainly check out that drive and possible fix it (re-vectoring bad sectors, etc).

Be aware though that it will take a looooooooooong time to run!!

Good luck with trying a different drive.