Advice please: boot problem with Solaris 10 on i86

UNIX Solaris
1

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

          &lt;&lt;&lt; timeout in 5 seconds &gt;&gt;&gt;

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.

2

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?

3

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

4

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

:slight_smile:

5

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.

6

Dear lyonsd,

Good detective work!

Thanks for posting your solution for others.

7

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