[Suns-at-Home] problem moving Solaris 9 system disk from U60 to U2

[Ken Hansen]

On Feb 25, 2007, at 4:34 AM, Craig Dewick wrote:

>
> Hi everyone,
>
> I'm sure we've all done this sort of thing - shift an installed  
> system disk with Solaris on it from one Ultra system to another, or  
> similarly with sun4m systems or even sun4c systems.
>
> Anyway, I have a U60 system which I want to replace with a U2 so  
> that I can use a Sbus magma serial port card. The magma Sbus  
> Solaris 9 driver actually works, while the PCI driver (I have a PCI  
> version of the Magma 4-port card too) does not.
>
> Anyway, I loaded the OS from a Solaris 9 CD copy with the target  
> disk in slot 0 of the U2 that's replacing the U60 system, manually  
> mounted the root partition as /tmp/root/t0, removed the contents  
> of /dev and /devices, replaced the path_to_inst file with  
> '#path_to_inst_bootstrap_1', unmounted the disk, made sure the  
> bootblk was correct using 'installboot', and rebooted with '-rv'.
>
> The kernel on the target disk then loads fine, gets to the point of  
> displaying the properties of the two 300 Mhz CPU's in the U2, and  
> hangs.

That's not the Kernel, that is the OBP, "hardwired" on the system board.

> I've already tried breaking out of the kernel, syncing the disks,  
> and trying the whole process again, with the same end-result.
>
> The second time I tried it with an extra step - manually re- 
> creating all the device nodes with 'devfsadm -r /tmp/root/t0'  
> before unmounting the target disk and doing the reconfiguration boot.
>
> The next think I'm going to try is re-doing it a third time, re- 
> creating /dev and /devices manually as above before trying to boot  
> off the target disk, but I won't pass the '-r' option and see if  
> the kernel will act correctly when it sees the path_to_inst file in  
> the default state.
>
> I might try connecting up this machine and running tip on the  
> serial port in case the U2 is dumping some debug info but I don't  
> think it would be as the kernel loads and that would be taking  
> control of the system.
>
> Can any of you think of something I'm missing?

I think the differences are too deep to enable such a migration - do  
you have enough disks to build up the Ultra 2 with a base install of  
Solaris, then migrate the files you need manually? I have a friend  
that moved system disks between Ultra 1s and Ultra 2s, but those  
systems are very closely related (boot -r was sufficient in that  
case). He held on to the Ultra 1 as a replacement if the Ultra 2  
failed for just that reason.

I think you'll need another disk to accomplish your ultimate goal...

Lionel