[rescue] Trying to revive my E450

[Toby Thain]

On 2015-10-25 11:50 AM, microcode at zoho.com wrote:
> A ZFS root does not necessarily get the bootloader installed on both drives
> of the mirror AFAIK. If you are sure you tried booting from both disks and
> it doesn't work, that is hard to understand.

Yes, this is the situation.

 > It is also not a good sign the
> disk label isn't recognized. Are you sure you got the right disks?

Yeah. When I packed it up, I wrapped the disks in foam and tape and 
stored them carefully with the key, so I know it's the pair.

 > I have
> seen that error before when trying to boot from a non-Solaris disk. For
> example if you install *BSD on a SPARC box and then try to do a fresh S10
> install you get that message until you manually format the drives with
> Solaris format.
>
> Are you sure you are booting from the right drives? It might be worth trying
> to boot from the other drives too in case you pulled the wrong ones.

There were only two in this array.

The two drives DO probe with probe-scsi, I meant to say this (though 
probe-scsi-all hangs).

The machine only has CD-ROM, so I must have done the original install 
from CD-ROM images of Solaris 10, which Oracle no longer supplies. (If 
anyone has a set, let me know...)

Thanks for writing.

--Toby

>
> On Sun, Oct 25, 2015 at 11:02:47AM -0400, Toby Thain wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I have an E450 with 4 cpus installed that ran fine for a few years as a
>> Solaris 10 box with ZFS boot. About 4 years ago I mothballed it and pulled
>> the two boot drives out to store (ZFS was in a mirror configuration).
>>
>> This weekend I decided to see if it would come up again.
>>
>> Predictably, the NVRAM is dead. "The IDPROM contents are invalid"
>> And it's forgotten its mfg-options. (I found info by Googling that this
>> should be set to 49 for E450.) I'll have to do something about that.
>>
>> More surprising to me than the NVRAM failure though was that it produces the
>> same result when I try to boot from either drive:
>>
>>
>> ok boot disk
>> Boot device: /pci at 1f,4000/scsi at 3/disk at 0,0  File and args:
>> Bad magic number in disk label
>> Can't open disk label package
>>
>> Can't open boot device
>>
>>
>> It seems unlikely to me that both disks have died. Does anyone have any
>> other ideas? Could it be related to the NVRAM failure?
>>
>> Here's what I haven't tried yet:
>> - I haven't checked disk jumpers
>> - I haven't tried to mount the disks and check them on another machine. This
>> could be a bit of work, but I can get around to it.
>>
>> It's a long time since I set up this Solaris/ZFS install. Maybe I've
>> forgotten some quirk of booting ZFS on old SPARC. Any suggestions welcome.
>>
>> --Toby
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