[SOLVED] Re: blank screen + flashing cursor after grub screen - safe mode boots OK. on X4540

On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 10:58 AM, D G Teed <donald.teed@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
We have a X4540 running Solaris 10 10/08. It was updated
via smpatch update, and then rebooted via shutdown with -i6.

It currently will not boot up.

On boot up the last thing looking good is the grub splashscreen.
After that it displays a flashing cursor - not even the kernel has loaded.

Nothing seems wrong in the ILOM status, although Oracle support is looking
over
many reports dumped from there and ipmitool.

Booting the grub option for safe mode works OK.

So far, the only lead I have is that ZFS status has changed.

We are running ZFS mirror on the root partition.
If I do "zpool status" it reports:

state: ONLINE
status: The pool is formatted using an older on-disk format. The pool can
still be used, but some features are unavailable.
action: Upgrade the pool using 'zpool upgrade'. Once this is done, the
pool will no longer be accessible on older software versions.

The disk status and rpool status lines all show ONLINE.

There are no other boot options on this system - it is just Solaris.
There are no zones set up.

When I google to research the possible relationship between a grub no-boot
and zpool upgrade, I see errors where zpool upgrade has triggered
a no-boot situation.

I can find lots of resources discussing this stuff, some of it 3 or more
years
old and much on OpenSolaris. For example:

http://wiki.genunix.org:8080/wiki/index.php/ZFS_rpool_Upgrade_and_GRUB

I don't know if this advice applies to Oracle Solaris.

Any hints appreciated...


I have learned why I can't see the console. In /boot/solaris/bootenv.rc
there was:
setprop console 'ttya'

while I needed:

setprop console 'text'

(we are running with disabled dtlogin desktop)

The hidden console was revealed, and Solaris was prompting to
identify the keyboard type, like it was running the OS installer.
After that one prompt, the system booted up normally.

Thanks to Todd Cox for the tip to see the actual console in ILOM via:
start /SP/console

--Donald
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