On Wed, May 07, 2008 at 05:27:00PM -0400, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Well, I'm using the latest openSolaris.....and since I can no longer > boot ANYTHING, I can't add -k to the boot options.
Can you boot from install media? > Something was drastically changed by my installing openSolaris which > prevents me from successfully installing ANYTHING else! While I agree that it appears this way, it's very unlikely that software destroyed hardware. So one of two things seems likely to be happening here: 1. There is a hardware problem of some kind. If you cannot boot from any install media, this is sure to be the diagnosis. The only way I can imagine software causing this problem is if the BIOS settings somehow became corrupted (which would be odd since I don't believe there's any interface provided to manipulate them but it doesn't hurt to check). If you can enter the "setup menu" it may be profitable to ensure that all settings are sane or, preferably, at their factory defaults if possible. After that exercise, is it possible to boot from install media? If you cannot boot from the CD/DVD drive, do you have a PXE server available? 2. There is nothing wrong with hardware, but the boot record on the disk is broken in some way that is confusing installgrub. Since I don't know anything about Ubuntu, it's difficult to guess what it's trying to do that's failing. But, if we're in this case you should be able to boot from install media. If you can get to a shell, you should be able to destroy the first few sectors of the disk, which should un-confuse installgrub. The way to do this on Solaris is to run format(1M) to find the name of your disk, then do dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdsk/cXdXp0 bs=512 count=1024 (the name of your disk depends on whether it's native SATA or legacy ATA). It should go without saying that this is destructive to data, but it doesn't sound like there's any that you care about. You may also be able to do something similar from another OS's install media, including blowing away the BIOS/DOS partition table. You should then be able to recreate the BIOS partition table with fdisk. The Solaris installer should allow you to do this; if it doesn't, that's a bug. I know nothing about the Indiana or Ubuntu installers (I assume when you say you're "using the latest openSolaris" that you mean Indiana, but it's possible you mean you're using SXCE which appears to be build 87). As for the hang itself, you're going to have to use kmdb. There are also a couple of settings you can add to /etc/system that cause the system to panic and/or enter kmdb on an NMI: set pcplusmp:apic_kmdb_on_nmi=1 set pcplusmp:apic_panic_on_nmi=1 If you can successfully reinstall, you can add these. Then when your system hangs, you can send it an NMI and perhaps you will then be able to debug it. The downside? I have no idea how to send NMIs on generic PC hardware. And, some of them seem to generate spurious NMIs as well, which may lead to premature/unwanted panics. This is definitely for debugging only in general, though it works well on most Sun servers as they have NMI buttons and/or SP NMI functionality. No doubt other servers do as well. If you can figure out a way to trigger NMIs on your laptop, this is good to try. If you need help debugging (for example, if you manage to get to kmdb and need help debugging the hang), opensolaris-code is a good place to get it. If you need end-user support, please try opensolaris-help or contact your vendor. -- Keith M Wesolowski "Sir, we're surrounded!" Fishworks "Excellent; we can attack in any direction!" _______________________________________________ opensolaris-code mailing list [email protected] http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/opensolaris-code
