cannot open /etc/path_to_inst file

UNIX Solaris
1

In trouble... booted system and error on prom is

"cannot open /etc/path_to_inst file"

Any suggestions?

2

Not any suggestions you'll like . . . .

/etc/path_to_inst is absolutely critical for the system to boot. If it can't find that you have basically no hope. Every time I've ever seen that it was because of either:

  1. A hardware failure with the root disk, or

  2. The root filesystem getting so smashed it wouldn't even boot enough to fsck itself.

The solution was always either replacing the disk or reinstalling Solaris depending on which of those 2 situations it was that caused the error message.

You could try booting off of CD or the network and see if you can fsck the root disk. If it passes the fsck, then you could try mounting the root partition to /mnt and see if you can repair the path_to_inst file (copy back a "path_to_inst.bak" or something if you have one). But I wouldn't get my hopes up if I were you. If it isn't even getting past the prom, maybe do a probe-scsi or probe-ide as appropriate to verify if the system is even able to see the root disk.

3

Hi - I dont know why this happened..

boot -a from the ok prompt has sorted it.. recreated the /etc/path_to_inst file... Thanks!!

4

Glad to hear it worked. I'm suprised a boot -a did it though.

I've had times where I've had to delete a bad /etc/path_to_inst and let it recreate one, but if it said it couldn't even open it when you booted that first time I wonder why it worked the second? That is why I said it is probably a dead disk or corrupted filesystem - otherwise why wouldn't it have just recreated it that first time?

Strange.

5

Yes it is strange. All I was doing before that was using the shutdown command... nothing that I dont normally do..

Anyway - thank god its not something worse.. thanks for help all the same.