[geeks] IDE drive problem on U5

[Michael Parson]

On Apr 25, 2010, at Apr 25, 2010 2:27 PM, Bill Green wrote:

> On 4/22/2010 7:36 PM, William Barnett-Lewis wrote:
>
>> Error msgs are:
>> Could not check or create system critical filesystems
>> Could not update disk with new configuration
>
> I'm almost certain this, as a later poster in this thread suggested, is a
disk labeling issue.  Solaris requires a different sort of disklabel than
Linux, BSD, et al.  At some point in the install process you should be able to
get to a terminal; there, use 'format' to write a new label to the disk, then
restart the installation and all should be well. Sorry, but I don't have any
Solaris installations at the moment to look at the semantics of the 'format'
command for you, but it's menu-driven and should be not too hard to sort out.

Back when I first got the IDE<->SCSI bridge for my Sparcbook, I couldn't get
Solaris (2.6) to label the disk.  I don't remember the errors, but it flat
refused to do anything.  I had a netboot setup for running NetBSD on a couple
of diskless Sparcs I had, so I booted one of those images and was able to get
NetBSD to label the disk w/o issue.  I then reboot from the Solaris media and
was now able to get format to write a new Solaris disk label on the drive.  My
memory of the failure mode is dim, and my notes on the subject (from 2003)
only outline what I just covered.

--
Michael Parson
mparson at bl.org