Sun Blade 2000 issues
thegman
We've got a Sun Blade 2000, it was crashing a lot and after trying
many things, we've ended up taking out both FC-AL disks, and putting
in an LSI SATA card with a 1TB SATA disk. We installed Solaris 10 onto
the this disk and it went entirely without incident and booted no
problem. Satisfied with a job well done, we went home only to return
the next morning to a crashed machine. We have the repeating error:
disk not responding to selection
And now the Sun Blade will not boot at all. The 1TB disk is very new,
and I doubt it's a fault with this disk. Anyone got any ideas? We
tried running the machine with the 2 FC-AL disks and the SATA, it
crashed, we tried with just the FC-AL, it crashed, and now we're onto
the just the SATA and it crashed and won't start up. My instinct is
that there is something wrong with the computer itself, although we've
run Sun VTS on it, and it did not report any issues at all.
Thoughts?
All the best
Garry
Dave
You do not say how it crashes. Does it put any message on the console? Some
information can be got from coredumps, though you need to know what you are
doing (and I do not!!).
Is there anything in /var/adm/messages to indicate what might be the reason?
Since it will not boot from disk, will it boot from a DVD?
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Andreas Wacknitz
and look at the messages you will get from the Blade 2000 before and
during it tries to boot from the disk. There will be additional
diagnostic messages send to the serial console.
When you get the Blade booting Solaris again you could also have a look
at the output of 'fmadm faulty'.
Regards
Andreas
thegman
>
> You might connect another computer via serial cable (null modem cable)
> and look at the messages you will get from the Blade 2000 before and
> during it tries to boot from the disk. There will be additional
> diagnostic messages send to the serial console.
> When you get the Blade booting Solaris again you could also have a look
> at the output of 'fmadm faulty'.
>
> Regards
> Andreas
Hi Andreas,
Thanks for the reply.. OK, we re-installed Solaris and booted the Sun
Blade for the first time. Things seemed fine at first, but...
On login, the login screen took a long time to respond to keypresses,
almost like the disk had to spin up first but was taking a long time.
When logged in, I ran fmadm faulty, which returned no results. I think
tried to launch SMC, which launched, but failed to load any toolbox. I
then tried to create a user on the CLI, but /export/home did not
exist, and on using "/home" it errored with the message "operation not
applicable". I decided to reboot, and now I'm back to "disk not
responding to selection" and it will not boot again.
This seems very odd to me, I can install Solaris faultlessly, then it
boots and seems "sort of" OK, then I reboot and it's hosed. fmadm,
SunVTS, probe-scsi-all (on firmware) all show no problems and the
machine otherwise seems OK.
I sort of suspect the whole PCI controller being dodgy, but can't seem
to prove that to the bean-counters.
Garry
Andreas Wacknitz
>> You might connect another computer via serial cable (null modem cable)
>> and look at the messages you will get from the Blade 2000 before and
>> during it tries to boot from the disk. There will be additional
>> diagnostic messages send to the serial console.
>> When you get the Blade booting Solaris again you could also have a look
>> at the output of 'fmadm faulty'.
>>
>> Regards
>> Andreas
>
> Hi Andreas,
> Thanks for the reply.. OK, we re-installed Solaris and booted the Sun
> Blade for the first time. Things seemed fine at first, but...
>
> On login, the login screen took a long time to respond to keypresses,
> almost like the disk had to spin up first but was taking a long time.
> When logged in, I ran fmadm faulty, which returned no results. I think
> tried to launch SMC, which launched, but failed to load any toolbox. I
> then tried to create a user on the CLI, but /export/home did not
> exist, and on using "/home" it errored with the message "operation not
(svcadm disable autofs; NOT recommended) or use it:
create the home directories in /export/home and enter lines like
username servername:/export/home/username
in /etc/auto_home (replace username by the name of the user and
servername by your computer's name or IP).
After adding such a line restart autofs: svcadm restart autofs
If being used, home directories will be mounted automatically by the
automounter to /home and unmounted if not used anymore.
> applicable". I decided to reboot, and now I'm back to "disk not
> responding to selection" and it will not boot again.
Your Blade seem to have real problems. It's hard to diagnose it from
here. You should really connect another computer to the serial interface
of it and have a look at the output. There will be some diagnostic
messages that might be helpful.
Andreas
DoN. Nichols
> thegman schrieb:
[ ... ]
>> Thanks for the reply.. OK, we re-installed Solaris and booted the Sun
>> Blade for the first time. Things seemed fine at first, but...
>>
>> On login, the login screen took a long time to respond to keypresses,
>> almost like the disk had to spin up first but was taking a long time.
[ ... ]
>> applicable". I decided to reboot, and now I'm back to "disk not
>> responding to selection" and it will not boot again.
> Your Blade seem to have real problems. It's hard to diagnose it from
> here. You should really connect another computer to the serial interface
> of it and have a look at the output. There will be some diagnostic
> messages that might be helpful.
IIRC -- he was trying to boot from either a Firewire or USB
mounted disk -- and I'm not sure that this works at all -- or it may
need some magic phrases in the "boot-device" EEPROM definition to boot
from a PCI mounted controller for either interface -- even the one
blessed by Sun. I don't think that it is considered to be usable as a
boot device.
I know that I have serious hangups for a SATA drive connected
via either interface (using the card which comes with the SB-1500 and
SB-2500 in my SB-2000) when using large disks -- 1/4 TB hangs up after a
while, and 1TB much sooner.
Now the initial installation *probably* boots under control of
the installer program, so it says something like:
boot /some-really/long-and-hard-to-type-path_to-the-device.
Mine, built on FC-AL drives (the native drives for the SB-1000 and
SB-2000) has:
======================================================================
boot-device=/pci@8,600000/SUNW,qlc@4/fp@0,0/disk@w21000004cf792280,0:a disk
======================================================================
as an example. FWIW, I actually installed it on a zfs mirror (two
identical FC-AL drives inside the machine), and have quite a few others
external to the machine.
Did it offer to change the NVRAM (EEPROM) settings for you? Did
you accept the offer? If the EEPROM setting for "boot-device" was *not*
changed, it probably has no idea how to boot once you shut down the
system as installed.
Have you tried installing on FC-AL drives as it was designed to
be set up? If that works, and your PCI interface to a SATA or some
other type of drive does not, that *might* help the bean counters to
come to the right conclusion. But when you are trying to build a system
which it was not designed for -- expect problems.
FWIW -- you can also install on a set of SCA SCSI drives in a
multipack installed on the external SCSI interface. I've done that with
no problems (other than way too much power for a mere 36 GB of disk
space -- 4 9GB 1.6" height drives. :-)
Good Luck,
DoN.
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