I have a Dell D630 laptop with Ubuntu already on it that I want to dual-boot
with OpenSolaris. Ubuntu is not using the whole hard disk now - partition 1 is
root, 2 is swap, and 3 is /home. There is 24GB left unused.
So I boot up the 2008.11 LiveCD and then run the GUI installer. It correctly
identifies the 3 Linux partitions and allows me to select partition 4 for
Solaris and give it the remaining 24GB of space. I go through the rest of the
screens and then it begins installing onto the hard disk. It gets up to 99%
complete and then just hangs there.
I opened up a terminal window to see what's going on and I see the installer is
trying to run this command:
bootadm update-menu -R /a -Z -o /dev/rdsk/c4t0d0s0
I left it sitting here for quite a while and it never completes, so I start
looking for disk issues. 'zpool status' says "One or more devices are faulted
in response to IO failures." and then it hangs - doesn't even list out the
structure of the pool.
So I figure my hard disk flaked or something. I tried to look at the partition
table with 'format' just to see if the disk is accessible at all. format is
able to read the disk, but the partition table looks wierd: slice 0 has a size
of 0 cylinders. Slice 2 has cylinders 0-3130 (the whole partition, as
expected) and slice 8 ("boot") has one cylinder (0). So something has hosed
the partition table.
I decided to reboot and try again to see if this is a one-off and I end up with
exactly the same results. However, I did open a terminal and look at the
partition table right after the installer sets up the zfs pool and begin
installing software onto the hard drive. At that point in time, slice 0 had
cylinders 1-494, slice 2 has cylinders 0-495 (why not the whole partition?) and
slice 8 has just cylinder 0.
So something (possibly "bootadm update-menu") is altering the partition table
after the zfs pool has been created. Slice 0 has no size, which explains why
zfs is unhappy. I used the format command to set slice 0 back to cylinders
1-494 as it was at the beginning of the installation. I did not change slice 2
or 8.
Now 'zpool status' just hangs without printing anything at all. Ditto for 'zfs
list' and 'zpool clear rpool'. Tried to 'kill -9' the bootadm process but it
won't die. Tried to reboot with the 'reboot' command in a terminal window but
it complains that another bootadm process is already running and just hangs.
Same for 'init 0' or 'halt' so I had to just power it off.
Powered it up again and selected "Boot from Hard Disk" when I got the grub
menu. Boot failed - screen just says "Bad PBR sig". Rebooted again and let
the LiveCD boot again. Tried 'zpool import -f rpool' and it says it can't find
it.
Where do I go from here?
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