SUMMARY: Short disk read

Hi folks,

Sorry I am a little late in summarizing.  Here is a summary of the
responses I received.  Thanks very much to the prompt and helpful
responses from Andres Rojas, Hichael Morton, Joanna Borg, Andrew Hay.
I had more than one helpful suggestion from Andres.

Based on the responses, on the fact that SUN doesn't make any 
Ultra-10's anymore, a fresh install of the operating System still won't
boot and in order to save time, I decided to trade-in the 
Ultra-10 for a newer SunBlade150(550 MHz) machine.  I am planning on buying an 
an additional 512MB of memory from www.crucial.com.

Andrew Hay and Andres also suggested "format->analyze->read".  I know 
I tried that but don't remember how many bad blocks I encountered.  
For erasing the drive, I ran "format->analyze->write" and
also "format->analyze->verify", after booting from CDROM, and 
and in both cases, the first pass was okay; 
"format" coredumped half way through the second-pass :-)  

The original message appears after the responses.

Thanks again for the great help received in this group.  This is a really
nice group.


-------------------------Responses:---------------------------
Andres Rojas:

(I)
The times I've seen these situations I've faced two options. 1) invest
hours to recover the disk with a 50/50% of chances or 2) recover the
lastest backups having installed a small OS first and put the machine back
into production.
***************************************

(II)
Here's a Sunsolve document that hopefully covers your problem. Please take
a look at it and see if this applies to your problem. This is the only one
document related to it.

Document ID: ID21952
Synopsis: Solaris[TM] 7 11/99 CD-ROM may fail to boot or mount

-----

Problem Statement Top

Solaris[TM] 7 Software 11/99 CD-ROM


When booting directly to cdrom the following occurs:

      {0} boot cdrom
      Boot device: /pci@1f,4000/scsi@3/disk@6,0:f  File and args:
      Short disk read
      The file just loaded does not appear to be executable.
      {0} ok


With the system booted, Inserting the cdrom causes this error:

      # WARNING: /pci@1f,4000/scsi@3/sd@6,0 (sd36):
        Error for Command: read                    Error Level: Retryable
        Requested Block: 64                        Error Block: 1260864
        Vendor: TOSHIBA                            Serial Number: 12/12/97
        Sense Key: Media Error
        ASC: 0x15 (random positioning error), ASCQ: 0x0, FRU: 0x0


The cdrom never mounts.

Resolution Top

This is caused by defective media.

Identify the CD-ROM as follows:

      Solaris 7 Software 11/99
      Part Number: 704-6854-10 November 1999 Revision A.

      On the face of the CD-ROM just above the center ring
      there is a six digit batch number.


If this number is  278396   the media needs to be replaced.
***************************************

(III)
Another hint came into my mind.

1)
Have a backup at hand.
Booting from CDROM repartition the disk. Look carefully you're not
overlapping partitions
Recover the backups.
Run the installboot procedure if needed.
Test your machine.

2 )
Have a backup at hand.
Boot from CD-ROM and run format -> analyze -> test.
This should tell you how good/bad is the hard disk.
If there are too many bad blocks consider th replace de disks.
If there are few bad blocks, recover the backups.
Run the install boot procedure if needed.
Test your machine.

- Andres.
***************************************

Andrew Hay asked:
unrecorded [new] bad blocks?  what does a format->analyze show?

*************************************

Hichael Morton:
replace the disk.

Joanna Borg:
Hello,

Since you have to install the Solaris 8, I would use a new hard disk.

-------------------End of responses-----------------------

------------Original Message:------------------------------

Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2003 12:11:19 -0400
From: Shanti Suresh <shanti@umich.edu>
Subject: Short disk read - HELP please!
To: sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org
Cc: shanti@umich.edu

Hi folks,

I have an Ultra10 here which was fine until, I believe, a power outage.
It just won't boot up.  Here is a summary of the problem and what I've
done so far.

The OpenBoot PROM is version 3.15 on a Sun Ultra10, 360 Mhz machine.
When I boot the machine, I get:
-------------
Short disk read
failed to read superblock.
failed to read superblock.
failed to read superblock.
Boot load failed.
The file just loaded does not appear to be executable.
--------------

I booted from a Solaris2.6 cdrom.
I fsck'd the "/" filesystem and it had problems reading sectors 7, 16
and 17.  So I aborted the fsck, used an alternate superblock of 32,
and got it fsck'd.  I then did an "fsck /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0" and
things are fine.

I am able to boot from CDROM, mount "/" under "/a"
and things look good.  Also, "lost+found" in
"/a/lost+found" is empty.
I also did an "installboot", just to be on the safer
side.  I mounted "/" under "/a", also created a clean copy of
"ufsboot" from cdrom into "/a"(i.e. "/").

Booting now says the same thing:
------------
Short disk read
failed to read superblock.
failed to read superblock.
failed to read superblock.
Boot load failed.
The file just loaded does not appear to be executable.
------------
I booted from the CDROM.
Ran "format", and saw the priamry drive.  It is a
0. c0t0d0 SEAGATE ST39140A cyl 17660 alt 2 hd 16 sec 63
(8.49 GB)
I selected the drive, labelled the drive. Rebooted.

Same errors as in the beginning, starting with "Short disk read"
and ending with "The file just loaded does not appear to be executable".

The superblock is really not bad, at least as reported by "fsck", and
"lost+found" being empty.  So "Short disk read" is what the problem is.
My "/" partition is only 100MB.

Oh, and I also checked the device alias for "disk" and the
OpenBoot parameter for "boot-device".  They both look good.

Luckily, I was able to read the "/" filesystem when mounted under "/a".
So maybe I backuped it up that way onto another partition.

Since I wanted to upgrade the machine to Solaris2.8,
I reloaded the Solaris2.8 Operating System onto the hard-drive.  The
"initial install" formatted the drive fine and loaded the Core operating
system.  However, on a manual reboot, I still get the same error 
messages starting with "Short disk read" and ending with "The file
just loaded does not appear to be executable".  This time, two sets
of these messages.

I'm wondering what else I can try.  I've got to get this done quick
to make a few people here happy.  So any help would be great.


Thanks.

                                                     -Shanti
-----------------------End of Original Message-------
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