SUMMARY:kinda long: read only disk at boot

From: Alex Vinson (alexvi@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Fri Sep 15 2000 - 10:53:52 CDT


Thanks to all who replied! There were 15 messages altogether,
including one kind soul who reminded me he was out of the office.
;) I'm sorry to not mention you all, but I wanted to get this
summary out quickly in case it might help someone else.

Most of the answers related to re-mounting the disk, i.e.
   mount -o rw,remount /dev/dsk/cxtxdxsx /
and then check /etc/vfstab for errors. Been there, done that.

Others suggested booting to CD, fsck'ing the disks, mounting them
on /a, /mnt, etc., and then looking around for a messed up
/etc/vfstab. Yep, tried that too.

Still others thought I maybe had a full filesystem. Nope, 800MB
free.

Alas, all good suggestions, but none of them worked. After a
couple of hours, I got to level-3 support at Sun, and they said
that my disk was probably corrupted (duh!). However, they had a
pretty cool suggestion:

Boot to the original install cd like you're going to re-install,
in my case Solaris 2.7, 3/99.

Go through the normal install procedure, EXCEPT when given the
chance, *perform an upgrade*. This will lay back down all the
original filesets without building filesystems, etc. Lo and
behold, this worked!

Of course, now my system is in a wierd state w/ some patched
filesets and some others not patched, and it no longer knows
about my installed packages, etc, so now I performed a complete
recovery from last nites backup, leaving off the /dev,
/devices,and /tmp. Rebooted and crossed my fingers.

My system is back, with NO data loss. 5 hours of downtime stinks
(especially after 250+ days uptime!), but I'll get over it.

Thanks for all the suggestions!

Alex

DISCLAIMER: Don't blame me if this doesn't work for you.
Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn't. ;) The Sun guy
said they had about a 90% success rate with this procedure after
corruption.

Original Message --
>
> Hi Admins!
>
> I rebooted one on my Ultra5's, and it only boots to single user

> mode w/ read-only file system. No errors on boot except that
it
> can't create /var/adm/utmp.
>
> Have tried boot -as and ignored the system file just in case,
but
> not luck. Still coming into single user mode. Of course, if I

> try to boot to another run level, it just goes back to single
> user mode.
>
> No disksuite or veritas, just 3 hard partitions (/ , swap, and

> /opt). Any ideas???

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