Quote:>:POSSIBLE TROUBLE: from Installation Notes #1158936
That's a very old bug. I'm pretty certain that it's fixed in the
current version of the dpt driver which is included in the latest DU.
You should always use the latest DU floppies (rather than the FCS ones
that are included with the CDROM) to do a Solaris x86 installation. If
you have any sort of driver related installation problem the first
response is *always* to tell the customer to try doing the installation
using the latest DU release and see if the problem goes away. That way
you avoid running into all the myriad installation problems others
before you have discovered, and reported, and which we've already fixed.
Quote:>++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++======
>This disk has several bad blocks found. Why doesn't the fdisk and format
>find these during the install and map them out?
That would significantly increase the amount of time to install
Solaris. A 1 Gig drive can easily take over 30 minutes to format (a a
P-100 system using an 4X CDROM drive only takes about 30 minutes to
install all the Solaris x86 packages; installing the DU patches then
takes an additional 15 to 60 minutes depending on how much RAM you've
got). Larger drives take much longer to format (a 4 Gig drive may take
around 2 to 3 hours) and there's no way to format just portion of the
drive. New drives are always shipped with their bad sectors already
remapped so formatting the drive for every Solaris installation would
be a major waste of time. Furthermore, most new SCSI drives
transparently handle their own error recovery and remap failing sectors
(that weren't remapped by the factory) before the sectors go completely
bad so you don't lose any data.
Quote:>I'd like to low-level format
Generally it's impossible to low-level format a SCSI drive, You can
only logically format it and/or remap sectors via the defects list.
Quote:>it or at least run format and map the bad
>blocks out. I don't know how to do this without first booting into
>single user which I can't without a system. Any ideas when starting from
>scratch besides buying a new hard disk?
Are you certain you've really got bad sectors and that's what caused
your installation to fail? Most drives with failing sectors report
"corrected" errors but you rarely see any "uncorrected" errors until
the drive is on the verge of completely failing (assuming you don't
have a cabling or terminator problem which is in fact much more likely
than bad sectors on a new drive).
If you have a drive that in fact just has a few bad sectors which need
to be manually remapped, then I would ordinarily say boot from the
CDROM and exit to a shell prompt and run format from there. But
recently we discovered that on an x86 system the format program
incorrectly byte-swaps the sector numbers in the drive's defect list
(bug #1261869). So if you let the x86 version of format try to remap
the bad blocks it will remap the wrong blocks. Instead, you should
either:
attach the drive to a SPARC system and use its format program
to update the defect list, or
use the controller's BIOS format utility (Adaptec controllers
such as the AHA-2940 have this capability, I'm not certain
about the DPT controllers but I think they give you a floppy
with a format utility), or
turn on the drive's auto-remap option, if it's not already on,
and run the format/analyze/write or format/analyze/verify
commands (most drive vendors either enable auto-remap by
default or will give you a DOS program to turn on the option),
or
use the drive vendor's standalone or DOS format or defect
management program, or
call your SunSoft support contact person and ask for a patch to
fix 1261869.
Quote:> ...
>I get into the OpenWindows screens, fill in a bunch more things and away
>it goes. Sometime later, OpenWindows shuts down and I'm left with a
>"Starting OpenWindows" screen, but nothing happens, no disk/cd activity.
>So I remove the boot floppy and power cycle the machine thinking it is
>hung. When it reboots, it says "Missing partition boot record" in red
>letters and is dead.
The "missing partition boot record" problem occurs because your
installation didn't complete successfully. The boot block isn't written
out until the install program finishes installing all of the necessary
packages. Unfortunately you can't restart the installation or manually
fix up your boot drive. You have to re-do the whole installation and
this time you should use the floppies from the latest DU release (which
you can grab from access1.sun.com) and use install programs CUI mode
rather than GUI mode (press F4 on the second screen to bypass the GUI
configuration). That way you'll get the latest drivers for your SCSI
and network adapters and you'll avoid any potential video driver or
OpenWindows problems (VLB video adapters and VLB motherboards are very
problematic, which may have something to do with why almost no one
sells them anymore).
BA
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