I've finally woken up and realized this smells like hardware (the problem I started from a week ago smelled rather like software to me, which may partly explain my slowness).
Today, here's what I'm seeing: Install OpenSolaris 2008.11 from the LiveCD. It gets to the end, sometimes lets me boot and update software with the GUI tool. Sometimes not. Lately it's been not booting, or rather going into a reboot loop, where it never gets up far enough to log in. I'm installing on a slice that's "nearly" all of an 80GB SATA disk (the default for the "partition" option; I'm not using the full disk option because I intend to mirror later, and you can't do that when you installed with the "full disk" option). This hardware ran as my household NAS for over a year prior to this round of trouble. The trouble started out looking like software, and a complete software reinstall seemed to fix it. Due to time conflicts it took me a week to get all the little software configuration things cleaned up, and just when I was about to go live -- it corrupted the smf database. I've been thrashing since then. Anyway -- the hardware was originally compatible with Solaris :-); and even installed OpenSolaris 2008.11 cleanly a week ago. But not today. That sounds very hardware-like to me. I'm currently running memtest86 in hopes of finding bad memory. After that, what's worth trying? I'd hate to spend the bucks for random motherboard and/or processor replacement. Maybe random power supply replacement? Do makers of modern motherboards ever issue diagnostics I could download? I suppose I should track that down and see. Any other ideas? I'm getting behind on things and getting really annoyed here. Want this to work!!! (Yeah, I know, if I want 24x7 commercial support I can have it for a price, starting with much pricier hardware to begin with and much LOUDER hardware, which wouldn't work since this system lives in my office/bedroom.) -- David Dyer-Bennet, dd-b at dd-b.net; http://dd-b.net/ Snapshots: http://dd-b.net/dd-b/SnapshotAlbum/data/ Photos: http://dd-b.net/photography/gallery/ Dragaera: http://dragaera.info
