Hi all,
I've somehow gained the idea that I _need_ to run at least 1 box with Solaris, but things don't go as I had planned 
I pulled this ancient IBM eserver xseries 305 out of the dust, and got myself a fresh copy of the required cd's for Solaris 10u7. FAIL, for some reason the box and the cd's hated each other and, after a wasted evening, I decided to change approach: I dragged the machine to my office, hooked it up with some generic IDE dvd-drive, and installed successfully using the dvd-image.
All nice and easy, so I disconnected the dvd-drive (it's one of those generic early century atx-fitting things that just dont fit in a 1u machine) and took the box back home. Another usefull day at the office
FAIL again, couse since I came home, the machine won't boot, except for failsafe. Normal boot results in a reboot after displaying the fact that its use is subject to licence yadayada.. Disconnecting the original cd-drive had no result, nor had fiddeling with BIOS parameters. Does anyone has a clue for me to start looking? Since this is my first Solaris installation, I don't want to give up allready =)
The last time I saw something like this it was a driver issue. Since the DVD drive has been removed I would try a reconfigure boot. Boot into failsafe mode, run the following command, and reboot.
touch /reconfigure
this command will go to the failsafe root...?! you've to mount the / filesystem and run the touch command against the mounted / filesystem. something like:
touch /a/reconfigure
haven't tried this but "should" work. from failsafe boot enter:
reboot -- -r
this works on sparc, but you can try on x86.
tnx alot for both your quick replies! I tried both, but so far no good... I also tried giving the '-r' flag as a boot-argument to the kernel, from grub, but thats not working either... it's almost as if all efforts halt even before it comes to questioning itself wether to reconfigure or not... Is there a Solaris equivalent of a initrd that I have to rebuilt, or is this exactly what you do when forcing a reconfiguration? And is there a way I can do this from failsafe mode?
Try adding the "-v" option via grub. Maybe the kernel will complain about something that you can fix.
What CPU do you have in that x305? FWIW, I had a similar issue with a Dell SC440. It wouldn't boot 10u6 until I disabled the second core of the dual-core CPU. But OpenSolaris works fine on it.
Just tried -v, and it actually blasts a lot of output for little less than a second, before rebooting. The messages disappear immediately at that moment, so no luck with that yet. Thanks anyway 
Tomorrow I'll take it to work again, and hook up the dvd-drive again, see if that works.
It's a 2GHz P4 by the way, single core, single cpu. It's kind of an obsolete machine, but good enough for non-production fiddling =)
Can you tell if it's mounting your root file system? If so, it should be able to log what's causing the reboots in /var/adm/messages.
The filesystem showed no trace of a read/write mount. Logs showed no love 
I ended up reconnecting the DVD-drive, and the machine booted like nothing ever happened, except that it reconfigured during boot, due to previously creating the /reconfigure file. The only difference was that I used another (longer) IDE cable, because the native one was to short to connect the DVD-drive. So I tried to boot it with the native CD-ROM drive, and you never guess: I booted, albeit this time it kept whining about a corrupt HDD...
I'm trough with it, I grabbed a spare disk, and installed centos on it, in little more than 20 minutes. I wanted to learn another OS, other dan Debian, not learn another installation routine called painland :-s
Guess I'll get myself a Sun box to fiddle with solaris, support will most likely be a little better...
Thanks for all the help though