can't read Solaris 2.6 x86 hard disk on Solaris 2.6 Ultra-1 ?!?

can't read Solaris 2.6 x86 hard disk on Solaris 2.6 Ultra-1 ?!?

Post by m.. » Tue, 10 Mar 1998 04:00:00



I was going to use this hard drive to move large files from my
Ultra to my Pentium PC for CD-R backup, but upon "boot -r" on
the Ultra I saw an error about "invalid geometry" on sd3, the
drive I had formatted on my PC to be ufs.  And now of course
I can't even "prtvtoc" this disk ("Unable to read Disk geometry"),
so mounting it is seemingly out of the question.

What's the problem?  Was I naive to assume the a ufs on a Solaris
system would be the same regardless of CPU type?  I really don't
want to use Ethernet to transmit potentially gigabytes of data
on a regular basis :-(...

Please reply via email (and post here, of course), as I don't
get a chance to keep up with the newsgroup as regularly as I
would wish.  Thanks.

--
--
Mark J. Kaufman             Sun Microsystems, San Diego

 
 
 

can't read Solaris 2.6 x86 hard disk on Solaris 2.6 Ultra-1 ?!?

Post by D. Roc » Tue, 10 Mar 1998 04:00:00



: I was going to use this hard drive to move large files from my
: Ultra to my Pentium PC for CD-R backup, but upon "boot -r" on
: the Ultra I saw an error about "invalid geometry" on sd3, the
: drive I had formatted on my PC to be ufs.  And now of course
: I can't even "prtvtoc" this disk ("Unable to read Disk geometry"),
: so mounting it is seemingly out of the question.
The problem is anywhere: You can't actually mount a SPARC ufs filesystem
on a x86 system or vice versa. They both use different endians and although
the metastructure is the same, it is ordered the wrong way for the other
architecture.

Second. Sparc and x86 disklabels are totally different. The disklabels on
the Sparcs are on the first sector of the disks while for x86 they are on
the 2nd (?not sure about that) sector of the Solaris fdisk partition.

Even the on disk layout of the disk labels differ (apart from the usual
byte ordering problem)

Daniel

 
 
 

can't read Solaris 2.6 x86 hard disk on Solaris 2.6 Ultra-1 ?!?

Post by NerveGa » Tue, 10 Mar 1998 04:00:00


Quote:> > I was going to use this hard drive to move large files from my
> > Ultra to my Pentium PC for CD-R backup, but upon "boot -r" on
> > the Ultra I saw an error about "invalid geometry" on sd3, the
> > drive I had formatted on my PC to be ufs.  And now of course
> > I can't even "prtvtoc" this disk ("Unable to read Disk geometry"),
> > so mounting it is seemingly out of the question.

> The problem lies not in the format of the disk, but the fact that different
> controllers handle disk geometry differently.

    You may want to try re-paritioning and formatting the disk in the PC
using standard CHS or ECHS.  Standard CHS (cylinder-head-sector) will be
the most compatible, but will only allow ~ 540 megs.  ECHS will allow
more, but may or may not be compatible with the Ultra.  If it's a large
drive, chances are that your BIOS was defaulting to LBA geometry.

steve
--

----------------------------------------
Domain name for replying is "inconnect".
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can't read Solaris 2.6 x86 hard disk on Solaris 2.6 Ultra-1 ?!?

Post by Chris Tilbur » Wed, 11 Mar 1998 04:00:00



>> > I was going to use this hard drive to move large files from my
>> > Ultra to my Pentium PC for CD-R backup, but upon "boot -r" on
>> > the Ultra I saw an error about "invalid geometry" on sd3, the
>> > drive I had formatted on my PC to be ufs.  And now of course
>> > I can't even "prtvtoc" this disk ("Unable to read Disk geometry"),
>> > so mounting it is seemingly out of the question.

>> The problem lies not in the format of the disk, but the fact that different
>> controllers handle disk geometry differently.
>     You may want to try re-paritioning and formatting the disk in the PC
> using standard CHS or ECHS.  Standard CHS (cylinder-head-sector) will be
> the most compatible, but will only allow ~ 540 megs.  ECHS will allow
> more, but may or may not be compatible with the Ultra.  If it's a large
> drive, chances are that your BIOS was defaulting to LBA geometry.

Unless I'm very much mistaken, and something has changed with 2.6, disks
with UFS filesystems on them are not portable between different
architectures. You can't read a UFS filesystem created on a Sparc system on
an x86 system, nor vice versa.

Repartioning the disk just isn't going to help, full stop.

Cheers,

Chris

--
 Chris Tilbury, UNIX Systems Admin, Computing Services, University of Warwick

                            URL: http://www.warwick.ac.uk/staff/Chris.Tilbury

 
 
 

can't read Solaris 2.6 x86 hard disk on Solaris 2.6 Ultra-1 ?!?

Post by Donald Charles Kue » Sun, 15 Mar 1998 04:00:00


Daniel's on the right track. Solaris uses a label named "Volume Table OF
Contents" (VTOC) to keep track of the sizes and location of slices. You
find this VTOC on both Suns and PCs.

However, PCs use another disk label - the traditional, PC disk partition
table. It must exist for the PC to boot. Before you can install Solaris
X86 on a PC, you must first define a Solaris partition in the traditional
table.

All of which means, when a PC attempts to read a Sun disk, it fails because
it doesn't find the traditional table. And when a Sun tries to read a PC
disk, it fails because it finds the traditional table.

Also, there's the endian problem that Daniel mentions.


: : I was going to use this hard drive to move large files from my
: : Ultra to my Pentium PC for CD-R backup, but upon "boot -r" on
: : the Ultra I saw an error about "invalid geometry" on sd3, the
: : drive I had formatted on my PC to be ufs.  And now of course
: : I can't even "prtvtoc" this disk ("Unable to read Disk geometry"),
: : so mounting it is seemingly out of the question.
: The problem is anywhere: You can't actually mount a SPARC ufs filesystem
: on a x86 system or vice versa. They both use different endians and although
: the metastructure is the same, it is ordered the wrong way for the other
: architecture.

: Second. Sparc and x86 disklabels are totally different. The disklabels on
: the Sparcs are on the first sector of the disks while for x86 they are on
: the 2nd (?not sure about that) sector of the Solaris fdisk partition.

: Even the on disk layout of the disk labels differ (apart from the usual
: byte ordering problem)

: Daniel

 
 
 

1. Booting Solaris 2.6 x86 from hard disk

Hi, I have installed Solaris 2.6 x86 on the 2nd partition on the 3rd
disk in my PCi (the 1st partition is a small DOS one).  I can boot it
with the supplied floppy by selecting the hard disk from the list of
bootable devices but cannot get it to boot via LILO - it just hangs when
I select the 'Solaris' option I added to /etc/lilo.conf.  LILO can still
boot DOS/Linux/FreeBSD on the other disks.

I have tried - installboot pboot bootblk /dev/rdsk/c0t3d0s2

Any suggestions ?

I would prefer not to re-install as I have a single-speed external SCSI
CDROM drive and it took 20 minutes just to load the installation kernel
off the CD !

Thanks,
Ian.

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