[geeks] [rescue] Solaris 10 x86 repair

[Phil Stracchino]

On 09/05/10 15:09, Phil Stracchino wrote:
> Something Bad happened on my main server at about 0500 last night, and
> it went down hard.  After temporarily swapping in a DVD drive from my
> workstation so that I can boot from a Solaris 10 DVD (babylon4 has only
> a CD drive), it appears all the hardware is intact, and all the disks
> are good (though the boot archive on the boot pool was corrupt, though
> the install CD repaired that); but the system won't boot, and appears to
> be failing to start grub.  It looks as though whatever happened blew
> away the grub stage1 bootloader, which is easy enough to repair with
> installgrub, IF I knew what device to tell it to reinstall the
> bootloader *on*.  Normally, this would be /dev/rdsk/[boot disk]s3; but
> I'm using a mirrored ZFS boot, and I don't know what's the correct
> device to use in this case.
> 
> Does anyone else know?  STFW has been ... unhelpful so far.

Further:  I found one article indicating /dev/rdsk/[boot disk]s0 is the
correct device on a ZFS-boot system.  However, reinstalling grub did not
get me a bootable system.  I figured I could do an upgrade install of
10/09 u8 over the u6 that's on the machine now, but the regular
installer won't do it, and doing a liveupgrade appears to require that I
be able to boot the existing install, which I can't.  I can boot to a
single-user shell from the 10/09 Solaris DVD, find my root pool, and
chroot to it, but then I can't appear to mount the install DVD in order
to run the liveupgrade installer off it.  Every way I turn, I run into a
wall.

If anyone has any tips, it'd be appreciated.


So long as I'm at it, anyone know how easy/difficult it is on Solaris to
move a ZFS mirrored pair of disks to different controllers while keeping
their ZFS pool intact?  (In this case, it would be from c2d0/c2d1, on
the onboard SATA controller, to c0t0d0/c1t0d0 on the two PCI-X SAS
controllers, if I can make the cables reach.)


-- 
  Phil Stracchino, CDK#2     DoD#299792458     ICBM: 43.5607, -71.355
  alaric at caerllewys.net   alaric at metrocast.net   phil at co.ordinate.org
         Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
                 It's not the years, it's the mileage.