We are having a problem with initializing Solaris 8 installed on a Sunblade 1500 after having cloned the hard disc.
(The cloning process was done in a windows environment. Not a UNIX environment.)
Immediately after the cloning process neither hard disc would boot until the format label command was used to re-label the discs. Now they boot, but the previously installed Solaris 8 does not initialize to the login screen. Instead, the startup process dead ends in a black screen.
Any insight, suggestions, or comments would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you very much for replying MadeInGermany. Is this the code used for doing the cloning using the Sun system instead of the windows environment?
Our first objective is to initialize the Solaris 8 on the original hard drive that has now been relabelled.
After that is done then we can think about the cloning process or a mirror again.
We are trying to be cautious so as to not lose the programs and data on the original hard disc.
We appreciate the code that you suggest. Could you please explain what this code is intended to accomplish and whether or not it could lead to a loss of data from the hard drive?
Yes, the prtvtoc reads the disk label (a few sectors) and pipes (feeds) it to fmthard that writes a disk label.
The dd command copies all disk data. (That can take several minutes.)
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How does it boot? Does it say "is coming up"?
I have a video posted to Youtube of the booting process but I am a newly registered user here so I have to surpass 5 posts before posting a URL. THis is the third,
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I would like to post the URL already but the forum requires more comm.
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Prueba de inicio
by edward ernesto Feliz
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This is the link to a video of the booting process that may help in the diagnosis of the problem. Thank you all in advance for any possible assistance.
Scrap your Windows clone-disk program! It seems to have written to the source disk, destroyed its disk label.
The disk label contains the partition table. A new disk label comes with a generic partition table. That means the first partition ("s0", where it boots from) has identical start, but its size is certainly different; after some writings to the disk it can lead to I/O errors. Also the other partitions (obviously only the "s1" that is used for swap) are apart from their original location.
The black screen (when it enters graphics mode) might be a different problem. Did you change the graphics card, or the monitor, or the monitor cable?
While the suggestions made are very good, our basic problem is that the system will not proceed to the Solaris login.
Please recall that the hard drives were taken to a windows environment for cloning where they apparently lost their labels. They were reportedly relabelled and can boot now, but the Solaris 8 Login doesn't come up.
According to the shop that's where we are at right now.
I am wondering if anyone has any suggestions on how to get back to the Solaris login without losing the programs and data.
As far as I understand, there was a working system and another one you wanted to be a clone of the first one.
For some reason, while trying to clone the good disk to the unknown disk using the wrong tool, you broke the source disk label (i.e. partition table), then replaced it with an incorrect one.
If you have no third machine identically configured, it will be hard to know what was the original label looking like.
Yes, the file system is at risk, because its boundaries do not match with the partition.
You can get a root shell if you boot the box to single-user mode.
ok> boot -s
Send a break (Sun keyboard: hold Stop-key and hit A-key) to break to the ok> prompt.
The you can do
cat /etc/vstab
echo "0
p
p
" | format
to get the file systems and the current partitions.