> > I'm able to reproduce this kind of behaviour on an ASUS M2N-SLI > > mainboard when trying to boot from an external USB DVD writer > > device. In my case the Solaris GRUB optical boot media is readable > > just fine; It's the BIOS that starts reporting read errors for reads from > > the USB optical device, at the point when the /boot/grub/menu.lst file > > should be read. With a few hacks added to the GRUB boot code I'm > > able to work around that BIOS bug... > > Have you tried feeding that code back into Sun as a > contribution? I.e., I'm hitting the same problem > right now. Not a corrupted disk, but an inablility to > read from an external USB drive.
Btw. what mainboard are you using? Is it the same ASUS M2N-SLI mainboard? I've now found out that a better (?) [*] fix for the ASUS M2N-SLI is a BIOS upgrade. Starting with Revision 0402 of the M2N-SLI BIOS, an unmodified Solaris Nevada GRUB based boot CD can be booted from an external USB optical device. The current BIOS Revision is 0702, which is able to boot Solaris Nevada, too. [*] After flashing the new BIOS, my mainboard has lost the original nge ethernet MACs and seems to use some sort of "default MAC address", and has apparently assigned new PCI subsystem IDs to some of the PCI devices (including the nge NICs). All of this is no big problem for Solaris x86, tough. OTOH, a W2K installation on that box has become unbootable and crashes with a BSOD. That could be a bug in ASUS' BIOS integrated "EZ Flash 2" BIOS upgrade tool, maybe when updating from Revision 0202 to something newer. This message posted from opensolaris.org
