[SunHELP] external boot disk problems

[Jason Meggs]

Hi,

I have a corrupted boot disk on a sparc 20 running Solaris 2.5.1.  

Fortunately, I have a backup and an external SCSI drive.  I have
partitioned, newfs'd, and restored everything to the best of my knowledge,
as well as running installboot on the external.  

When I attempt to boot with the new drive (/dev/dsk/c0t1d0s[0134567])
using a command such as

 ok boot disk1:0 -rs
 ok boot disk1 -rs
 ok boot disk1

everything seems to be normal for a bit and then, suddenly a spray of
errors fills the screen along the lines of:

[BEGIN] 

exec /sbin/autopush -f /etc/iu.ap failed err=2 (exec of shell
failed) exec /sbin/rcS > /dev/console 2> &1</dev/console
 failed err=2 (exec of shell failed)

Cannot create /var/adm/utmp or /var/adm/utmpx
failed write of utmpx entry: "  "
SINGLE USER MODE
Please enter root passwd or type control-D to continue with normal
startup:

[END]

But one cannot enter a password or proceed, as it is then frozen.

I have been a bit surprised at not finding any clear instruction 
on this process in any man pages, texts, and faqs I've come across, 
on how to do this, so I don't know what I may be missing.

I got the same result through trying slightly different things
and even trying different media and a different partition scheme,
and being extra careful about the restore.

Any help or pointers to good information on this process would
be most appreciated.
 
Sincerely,
 
Jason Meggs