Very Computer

Hi,

I've installed solaris 10 i386 as vmware guest  on our linux host machine.

It worked perfectly until I applied all current patches via smpatch at once
(which took hours, though my host machine has a Athlon XP 2800+ CPU and 1 gig
memory).

Immediately after applying the patches I wanted to reboot. But the boot process
hangs at a very early stage:

###########################################
"Running configuration assstant...

It the system hardware has changed, or to boot from a different device interrupt
the autoboot process by pressing ESC.

Initializing sytsem
Please wat...
###########################################

At this point the the os consumes 100% of the cpu an won't continue anmore.

Of course, I tried to enter this menu by pressing ESC. In that menu, I
"continue" twice. The process then hangs at a point where it says something like
"Loading Driver ata.bef". At this point the machine hangs for hours with 100%
cpu usage and won't continue.

Is this a known issue?? How can it be solved?

Thanks Boris

Yes, I believe it is a known issue with a fix available, I *think*.
(I am not sure about this.)

I do not remember the patch ID or workaround, but saw a discussion on
this issue here about a month ago, I think.

-Dan

Hi Boris,

Are you at least able to get a "Select (b)oot or (i)interpreter:"
prompt?
Would you know offhand which revision of the kernel update patch you
applied? 118844-??

Thanks,
-Eric

No, the boot process hangs right before that point!

I've reinstalled solaris 10 on that client machine and applied the patches
again. This time I executed only "smpatch update". The last time I've also
applied all patches, that where disallowed by policy with the command "smpatch
add -x idlist=/var/sadm/spool/disallowed_patchlist"

The problem is reproducible in both cases.

I've also tried to boot "manually" by pressing ESC during the initialization
process. At some point (I don't know which point), I tried to scan for an IDE
device. At that point there was an error message like "ata.bef no such file or
directory"....

Quote:> Would you know offhand which revision of the kernel update patch you
> applied? 118844-??

I don't know. I think smpatch installs the latest version, which would be 118844-20

greets Boris

Ata.bef eh? Patch 120041-02 updated this, and stopped my machine from
booting too. Try backing that out...

Cheers,

Chris

Quote:>>I don't know. I think smpatch installs the latest version, which would be
>>118844-20

> Ata.bef eh? Patch 120041-02 updated this, and stopped my machine from
> booting too. Try backing that out...

How did you convince your machine to boot after you realized, that this patch
broke your installation?

greets Boris

I'm trying to remember!

It certainly involved starting from DVD, and I think I was able to
temporarily change the boot device (using the config assistant) from there
to the hard disk; once the OS has started from the hard disk you can log in
as root and run smpatch.

Cheers,

Chris