SUMMARY Can't get boot (ok) prompt?!?

From: Bill Fenwick (bill@splotch.digicomp.com)
Date: Fri May 15 1998 - 11:40:07 CDT


Thanks very much to the following people for responding:

Sanjaya Srivastava <Sanjaya.Srivastava@Eng.Sun.COM>
CHENTHIL KG <chenthil@mtcts1.ho.lucent.com>
Shawn <shstephens@amoco.com>
jam@cdicad.com (James Musso)
Ronald Loftin <reloftin@mailbox.syr.edu>
Reto Lichtensteiger <rali@meitca.com>
Jonathan Loh <Jonathan.Loh@BankAmerica.com>
Jim Harmon <jharmon@telecnnct.com>
Michael Sullivan <mike@trdlnk.com>
Goodson Alex A <Alex.Goodson@CTS.zeneca.com>
Jay Lessert <jayl@latticesemi.com>

Michael's suggestion of repeatedly pressing Stop-A from the moment power is
turned on finally got us the OK prompt. Alex suggested Stop-N (to restore the
default NVRAM settings), which we didn't try. Other suggestions included
checking for a bad graphics card, booting with no scsi devices attached (tried
it and it didn't make a difference), and doing various things with EEPROM,
which I was unable to do until I got the ok prompt.

Several people mentioned that in the Ultra series, the boot drive is no longer
scsi ID 3, but ID 0, so setting the new disk to 3 should not have been a
problem. That was correct; when we finally did get to a point where we could
do a probe-scsi, we found that the addresses of the internal disks were 0 and
1.

The upshot of all this is that we appear to have a corrupted root partition
which coincidentally seems to have become a problem at the same time our
telecommuter installed the new disk. So it wasn't the fault of the new disk or
the guy who installed it after all.

Now to deal with that partition... (double groan)

The original question:

>We've got a telecommuter who has an Ultra 1 model 170, running Solaris 2.5.1
>(HW 4/97), and who recently tried to hook up a 9G external disk (UniPack) to
>it. Unfortunately, he left the SCSI ID on that disk set to 3, which naturally
>matches the ID of the internal boot disk. Groan!
>
>Upon trying to boot the machine with the new disk attached, disaster of course
>ensued. So now, what I think we want to do is get the new disk off, do a
"boot
>-r", and start all over. Except that now, whenever he turns the machine on,
it
>hangs at "Boot device: disk file args" at the beginning of the process, and he
>can't do anything. Stop-A doesn't bring up the ok prompt. Neither does
Break,
>and neither does unplugging and plugging in the keyboard. (Dunno whether that
>works with Ultra 1's anyway... it does beep) He's tried this with the disk
>attached, with a different SCSI ID, and with all SCSI devices removed. He
>asked me to send him the Solaris CD's (which he did not have) in case he has
to
>re-install the OS... but if he can't get the ok prompt, I don't see how he's
>going to be able to boot from the CD.
>
>Apologies in advance if I'm missing anything blatantly obvious. I didn't see
>this particular problem in the archives. TIA and IWS.

-- 
Bill Fenwick                                    Email:  fenwick@digicomp.com
Digicomp Research                               Voice:  (607) 273-5900 ext 32



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