Exotic Ideas..
Angad's Blog
About this blog
I am Angad Singh. I have served as the Sun Campus Ambassador of JIIT University, Noida (India) from August 2007 to July 2008 and as a Campus Ambassador Tech Lead from July 2008 to July 2009. This was my sun blog. Here I jotted down all my random scribblings, reports on all activities I conducted as CA at my university, my little projects, hacks, geeky stuff and new technology I came across, all the way to things I learnt in my exciting journey with Sun..
About Me
View Angad Singh's profile on LinkedIn
Technorati Authority
View blog authority
Subscribe

AddThis Feed Button
Search

10 Recent Entries
» Goodbye..
» JavaOne 2009: Roundup
» JavaOne 2009: San Francisco Sightseeing Tour
» JavaOne 2009: The Parties and Dinners
» JavaOne 2009: James Gosling Student Q&A
» JavaOne 2009: Keynotes
» JavaOne 2009: The Conference Floor
» JavaOne 2009: The Pavilion
» JavaOne 2009: CommunityOne
» JavaOne 2009: The Prelude and the journey
Archives
« November 2009
SunMonTueWedThuFriSat
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
     
       
Today
Links
My..
Blogs that interest me


 

Today's Page Hits: 437

Best Viewed in..

Mozilla Firefox

Locations of visitors to this page
« Multibooting OpenSol... | Main | My blog on Technorat... »
Monday Jun 02, 2008
OpenSolaris 2008.05 has no Failsafe
I work on my laptop in OpenSolaris 2008.05, which rocks to the core, but unfortunately when the battery is low it doesn't be too informative about it and that causes it to go off instantly while working. That ofcourse leeds to booting problems due to a corrupt boot archive. The next time it booted, I got the old boot archive corrupted error, just as usual, and was advised to boot to Solaris failsafe to be able to fix that, as I always have. I don't even read  that error completely anymore, I've been facing it rather too frequently.

The only problem then was to go a failsafe or equivalent mode in OpenSolaris 2008.05. Whad'ya know: there's no failsafe in OpenSolaris 2008.05 yet (no GRUB menu entry for it either) and kernel option for single user mode "-s" doesn't fix the boot archive problem neither.

I finally had to take the risk of clearing my boot archive by running "svcadm clear boot-archive; exit 0" and "bootadm update-archive" once the system got up and running to create it again. Thanks again to BOSUG for the help! :)

I have to say it's tough living inside OpenSolaris, but more than worth it !
Posted at 01:24AM Jun 02, 2008 by Angad Singh in OpenSolaris  |  Comments[6]  |  del.icio.us digg slashdot technorati Stumble It! Share on Facebook furl reddit Share on Twitter    

Comments:

Help!

I can't even get to a point where I can type svcadm clear boot-archive. No matter what i do, no matter what i enter in grub, it wont boot, not even to a single user mode. How does one recover from the boot archive error?

Posted by Yossi on June 11, 2008 at 12:57 PM IST #

Yossi, are you able to 'boot' OpenSolaris upto the point when it displays the initial 3 lines having the SunOS copyright?

If yes, then it will give you a maintenance mode shell, asking you your root password. From there you can run the "svcadm clear boot-archive" command. Please tell up to which screen your system boots. Screenshot might be better to explain.

Posted by Angad Singh on June 11, 2008 at 01:32 PM IST #

No, it doesnt even show the Sun copyright, just tells me that /platform/i86pc/kernel/amd64/unix doesnt match the boot archive, and that i need to log into failsafe mode to fix it, and to press any key to reboot. i reboot and of course failsafe mode isnt one of the options grub presents me with.

Posted by Yossi on June 11, 2008 at 02:08 PM IST #

Hmm, in that case you have a different situation. Please post this question to http://www.opensolaris.org/jive/forum.jspa?forumID=31

Posted by Angad Singh on June 11, 2008 at 03:18 PM IST #

Hi Angad,

I currently have the problem you descirbed in a comment above! I can boot opensolaris 5.08 up until the 3 copyright lines, but then it hangs. It happened after the power cut out.

How can I get into maintenance mode to try svcadm clear boot-archive? I've got so much work sitting on my hard drive that needs saving!

Thanks.

Posted by Tom on September 07, 2008 at 04:00 AM IST #

Hi Tom,

Unfortunately, the maintenance in my case came up automatically after the 3 copyright lines...

Posted by Angad Singh on September 09, 2008 at 11:33 AM IST #

Post a Comment:
  • HTML Syntax: NOT allowed
Creative Commons License

This work by Angad Singh is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.