Re: rescue of hosed solaris 10 installation?

From: Delerium (delerium_27_at_hotmail.com)
Date: 03/22/05 

Date: Tue, 22 Mar 2005 16:52:16 -0500

Ian wrote:
> Hi All,
>
> Today I successfully hosed my Solaris 10 x86 installation and I'm hoping
> someone might be able to help me unhose it...
>
> I was creating raid-1 volumes by following the instructions at
> http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/816-4520/6manpiejm?a=view and did this
> successfully for three data volumes. The raid volumes are mirrored to
> identical hard IDE drives with identical partitioning.
>
> After my initial successes I moved on to creating a raid-1 volume for the
> root file system. I followed the instructions:
>
> metainit -f d1 1 1 c1d0s0
> metainit d2 1 1 c1d1s0
> metainit d0 -m d1
> metaroot d0
> lockfs -fa
> reboot
>
> Note that the tx (eg: c1t1d0s0) was missing in all the other setups and
> the sandard solaris 10 vfstab file too and the were no problems. All
> commands appeared to complete successfully.
> From that point on, my system has not been able to boot. When it tries
> to boot, I get the following output on the screen:
>
> WARNING: Error writing ufs log state
> WARNING: ufs log for / changed state to Error
> WARNING: please umount(1M) / and run fsck(1M)
>
> panic[cpu0]/thread=fec1be20: mod_hold_stub: Couldn't load stub module misc/strplumb
>
> fec25dd0 genunix:mod_hold_stub+139 (fec0420, 1, fe8cad)
> fec25dec unix:stubs_common_code+9 ()
>
> syncing file systems... done
>
>
> and the machine resets and tries to reboot. This is a circular process.
>
> I tried booting into single user mode by using boot -s, however the system
> got no further.
>
> I then booted using the solaris 10 installation CD (this is the full
> official release from Sun) and was able to go into single user mode. I
> did that by typing "boot cdrom -s" at the prompt when the installation
> procedure asks "Select type of installation". I also found later it's
> possible to cancel the installation and get a nice x-session with a
> terminal and do the work there.
>
> From single user mode on the CD booted system, I can see that my root file
> system, c1d0s0, is all there and apparently fully in tact. fsck does not
> report any errors and exits normally. I edited the vfstab file to change
> the reference from the metadevice for root back to the normal device,
> however that did not improve the situation - the boot problem remained.
>
> I tried removing the metadevice references by booting into single user
> mode on the CD, then chrooting to the solaris installation on c1d0s0
> which was mounted on /a (chroot /a /bin/sh), but metadb complains
> metadb: localhost: /dev/md/admin: No such file or directory
>
> As far as I can see, my installation is fully in tact, but for what ever
> reason I am not able to boot it. Does anyone have any ideas about how I
> can get my system to boot again? I don't want to reinstall because that
> would seem unnecessary, and I'm sure there's a solution to this.
>
> Ian
>

Hi Ian,

You may want to check out /etc/system, there's a line that start with
rootdev. If I remember correctly, the metaroot command add this line.
Maybe commenting it and rebooting with the / pointing to the device (and
not the metadevice) in your vfstab will help.

Not quite sure tough as I don't have a Solaris installation at hand.
Also, did you create a metadb before doing metainit?

Good luck!

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