Happily I can report that my two Sun V880 servers are now running again. I discovered early this morning that the reason I couldn’t boot from DVD is that the Toshiba DVD drives on these servers have a firmware bug which means they cannot read 2k sectors. So I had to spend some time downloading the Solaris 10 CD image. So if anyone is interested in the Solaris equivalent of booting from a rescue disk here it is.

At the OpenBoot prompt (you may have to send BREAK to the boot process to get the prompt which on minicom is CtrlA-f) type:

boot cdrom -s

and wait for what seems like an eternity while it boots up. You are then free to mount filesystems and fsck things to your hearts content.

Of course once I had the Sun boxes up and running we discovered that the Origin300 cluster was completely dead. The PROM has lost all it’s hardware info.

Current Mood: fatalistic