SUMMARY: Problems booting Solaris 2.5.1

From: Jeff Goodin (jmg7@alpha.CES.CWRU.Edu)
Date: Wed Mar 25 1998 - 08:15:45 CST


Hello All,

Thanks for all of the responses to my post about booting Solaris 2.5.1 from
a SCSI disk at id 5.

In particular thanks to:

         Dwight Peters <dpeters@nswc.navy.mil>
         Ronald Loftin <reloftin@mailbox.syr.edu>
         Daniel Button <DButton@exchange.ml.com>
         Art Freeman <Art.Freeman@ing-barings.com>
         John Malick <john@starinc.com>
         Bismark Espinoza <bismark@alta.Jpl.Nasa.Gov>
         Russ Poffenberger <poffen@San-Jose.ate.slb.com>

Most responses suggested that I move the disk down the scsi chain to 3
or lower. The problem was that disk5 was not a pre-defined boot
device (alias?). The disk booted fine when I moved it to id 3. I guess this
points to a lack of understaning on my part about aliases in nvram and
what typing 'boot disk5' actually does. I have included Dan Button's
response as it was the most complete and gave me as solution had I not
been able to move the disk in the scsi chain.

Thanks again to all who responded! This is the first time I have posted
a question here and was really impressed with the number of people willing
to help! Thanks Again.

Jeff Goodin
_________________________________________________________________________

The OBP does not have a predefined boot device of "disk5". Push it down
the SCSI chain to 3 or less and you can use the predefined disk values in
the boot PROM.

        My guess is that disk5 is not alias in the prom. Disks for Sun
are usually SCSI id's 0-3. Tape drives are reserved for id's 4 & 5 and
the CDROM is id 6. This does not mean that you can not have a disk on
id 5. You need to tell the prom what the alias is. I THINK the correct
command should be
"nvalias
/iommu@0,10000000/sbuas@0,100100/espdma@5,84000/esp@5,88000/sd@5,0:a
disk5"

If you do a "devalias", I think this will show what all the aliases are
mapped to. You want the disks of id's 3 & 5 to be the same path with
the 5 changed at the end instead of the 3. I think you will figure out
what I mean.

This is off the type of my head, so I'm not sure is that is correct. I
made the assumption that you are using the same bus for the internal
drive and the external drive. Do a "probe-scsi" to make sure that you
can see all the devices that you think should be there.

These commands are all done from the prom level (ok prompt). Once you
are booting off of the external disk, you could even set it up to
automatically boot off of the external disk. It would be something like
"setenv boot-disk? Disk5". The correct variable can be seen by doing a
"printenv".



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