SUMMARY: drvconfig doesn't work when booting from cdrom

From: V.Sander (zdv123@zam092.zam.kfa-juelich.de)
Date: Mon Jul 25 1994 - 17:31:19 CDT


Hi SUN Managers,

my original question was:

----- Begin Included Message -----
I have a little bit tricky question, but maybe someone has solved a
problem similar to that, we have.

Running Solaris 2.3 (including maintenance supplement 1) we had the
following problem after the internal disk crashed:

System backup is performed by a network backup tool
from Adstar (IBM) named ADSM.
After the new disk was installed, we booted from cdrom. We didn't want
to install a new system, because the backup should contain everything
we need.
Activating the nfs-server
(which was a hard job due to
the missing ability of writing to /etc/dfs; I had to mkfs the swap
partition, copying /etc/dfs to it)
enabled us to restore the whole data from another host,
except of the devices!!!!

Running installboot and thereafter booting with -r results in a watchdog
reset, quite after the root device is accessed and some (or all?) kernel
data is read (--> indicated by a rotating | )

So I thought, that the kernel should have at least some devices
(Is this right?). I rebooted from cdrom mounted the root filesystem to
/mnt.
Running drvconfig -r /mnt
does not work because of the missing writability for "/etc/path_to_inst"
and I have no idea to get drvconfig at work!

Any ideas, why rebooting results in a watchdog reset and how to create
the /devices when booting from cdrom?

Many thanks,
Volker

----- End Included Message -----

Many thanks to all who have responded.

First, why does booting results in a watchdog reset.
Having submitted the note above, I recognized that this is quite obvious.
I have no devices configured, especially no SCSI-Devices. Therfore booting
could never succeed, because you must have access to the root filesystem.

There were many suggestions with boot-options used:
     -v to get a better look to what happens during booting
     -ar to be prompted for several things (does not help in this case)
     -s which should create loopback mounts for /etc and /devices under /tmp
         but this is not right for /etc

Another possiblilit would be jump-start or a diskless client server to boot
from. This should work!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! But !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
SUN has recognized the same problem and has implemented an UNDOCUMENTED
option for drvconfig. Use

     drvconfig -p /mnt/etc/path_to_inst -t /mnt/devices

to tell drvconfig not to write to /etc/path_to_inst but to /mnt/etc/path_to_inst.

This is exactly that, which I was looking for. But it was to late for me.
The user wanted to get back his workstation much earlier, therfore I had
to reinstall the whole system from CDROM, including the Maintenance Supplement
and other kernel related SW, like WABI!

Again many thanks to all who have responded,

Volker

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    Volker Sander
    Central Institute for Applied Mathematics
    Research Center Juelich
    52425 Juelich
    Germany

    E-mail: V.Sander@kfa-juelich.de
    Phone: (+49) 2461 / 61- 6586
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