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zaanpenguin
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PostPosted: Sat Jul 09, 2005 5:33 pm    Post subject: *Desperate* SUN won't boot anymore Reply with quote

Hello,

I upgraded my OBP from 3.11 to 3.31 and now my SUN won't boot anymore. Whatever I try at the 'ok' prompt has no effect, it keeps saying 'The file just loaded does not appear to be executable'.

Partition layout:
Code:
livecd ~ # fdisk -l

Disk /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/disc (Sun disk label): 16 heads, 63 sectors, 16383 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 bytes

                                Device Flag    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1             1       101     50400   83  Linux native
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part2           101     79144  39837672   83  Linux native
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part3             0     79656  40146624    5  Whole disk
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part4  u      79147     79655    256032   82  Linux swap

Disk /dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part3 (Sun disk label): 16 heads, 63 sectors, 16383 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 bytes

                                 Device Flag    Start       End    Blocks   Id  System
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part3p1             1       101     50400   83  Linux native
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part3p2           101     79144  39837672   83  Linux native
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part3p3             0     79656  40146624    5  Whole disk
/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part3p4  u      79147     79655    256032   82  Linux swap

As you can see, I can boot fine from CD...

My SILO configuration:
Code:
livecd ~ # cat /etc/silo.conf
partition=1
root=/dev/hda2
timeout=10
device=/dev/hda
image=/boot/2.6.12
        label=linux
image=/boot/2.6.12-old
        label=old


This is all correct:
Code:
livecd ~ # ls /boot/
2.6.12      System.map         System.map-2.6.12-old  fd.b     generic.b  isofs.b     old.b     silo.conf   ultra.b
2.6.12-old  System.map-2.6.12  boot                   first.b  ieee32.b   lost+found  second.b  silotftp.b


Running SILO yields no errors... Can someone please help? There has to be a simple way of fixing this, and I really don't believe I'm the only one who has ever had this problem either. I've already spent 3 hours reading every single search result I could find on Google and on the Gentoo forums about this.
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zaanpenguin
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PostPosted: Sat Jul 09, 2005 9:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

OK I just completely reinstalled the SUN and it still doesn't boot. It seems to me OpenBoot 3.31 is just broken? Anyone?

Can anyone please send me an older OpenBoot Flash Update so I can try that?

My SUN is useless right now unless I boot it from CD!
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Weeve
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PostPosted: Sat Jul 09, 2005 11:52 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I'm assuming you've tried things like;
Code:
boot disk:c


Also have you tried running silo with the -f option?
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zaanpenguin
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 10, 2005 12:23 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Weeve wrote:
I'm assuming you've tried things like;
Code:
boot disk:c


Also have you tried running silo with the -f option?


Right, yes. None of those work. It's like OBP 3.31 simply doesn't accept booting a SILO bootblock...
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 10, 2005 9:06 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

zaanpenguin wrote:
Right, yes. None of those work. It's like OBP 3.31 simply doesn't accept booting a SILO bootblock...

but... the sparc LiveCD works?
have you tried to re-emerge silo?
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 10, 2005 10:51 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

k.gothmog wrote:
zaanpenguin wrote:
Right, yes. None of those work. It's like OBP 3.31 simply doesn't accept booting a SILO bootblock...

but... the sparc LiveCD works?
have you tried to re-emerge silo?


Yes... Re-emerged it plenty of times and tried exotic combinations of SILO flags as well: silo -f -u -i first.b -b second.b etc. (with -t and without -t).
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 10, 2005 12:18 pm    Post subject: Re: *Desperate* SUN won't boot anymore Reply with quote

some stupid questions:
are you sure that OBP you have upgraded is appropriate for your Sun?
the banner printed at boot shows a correct model and processor?
are you sure that "disk" isn't a wrong alias? check it in the device tree of the OBP
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zaanpenguin
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 10, 2005 12:22 pm    Post subject: Re: *Desperate* SUN won't boot anymore Reply with quote

k.gothmog wrote:
some stupid questions:
are you sure that OBP you have upgraded is appropriate for your Sun?
the banner printed at boot shows a correct model and processor?
are you sure that "disk" isn't a wrong alias? check it in the device tree of the OBP


Hi, yes. The banner shows Ultra5/10 etc. It is the right OBP for my SUN, booting from LiveCD works fine too. I did some more investigating and something else has struck me as odd:

Not just disk booting, but netbooting no longer functions either! I tried downgrading the OBP back to an earlier version, but no matter what image I try to load, I get a Fast Instruction Access MMU miss error now when it's done loading the image over the network. Perhaps there is something set incorrectly in the OBP that's causing all these problems? Any clues/suggestions?

The saga continues...
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gust4voz
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 10, 2005 1:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

If the livecd works and regular silo doesn't then i'd probably say that the new silo doesn't like you.
It's odd though, since i'm using the latest OBP in my u5 (it's the same motherboard as the u10) and works fine.
Anyway, you can "stick" an old silo easily, just go to http://www.sparc-boot.org/pub/silo/ and download the silo-loaders tarball you want (probably 1.2.6 since that's what the livecd uses) and stick all the *.b files in /boot, then run silo as usual and reboot.
BTW, older versions are in the "old" directory :-)
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zaanpenguin
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 10, 2005 3:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

gust4voz wrote:
If the livecd works and regular silo doesn't then i'd probably say that the new silo doesn't like you.
It's odd though, since i'm using the latest OBP in my u5 (it's the same motherboard as the u10) and works fine.
Anyway, you can "stick" an old silo easily, just go to http://www.sparc-boot.org/pub/silo/ and download the silo-loaders tarball you want (probably 1.2.6 since that's what the livecd uses) and stick all the *.b files in /boot, then run silo as usual and reboot.
BTW, older versions are in the "old" directory :-)


That didn't work either. It's like the OBP 3.31 is totally fucked when it comes to disk or net booting. Netbooting gives the Fast Instruction ... error, disk booting gives the File just loaded ... error.

I'm stumped, basically. My SUN is fried? Do I need to give the OBP some commands to make it correctly understand netboot images and disk boots again?

At this point I'm pondering giving SUN a call and asking them to reprogram it to an old OBP somehow.
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Weeve
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 10, 2005 3:50 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

You might try doing a "Stop+N" at boot-time to reset OBP to defaults if you haven't already. That may clean out something that's making it act crazy.
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zaanpenguin
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 10, 2005 4:48 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Weeve wrote:
You might try doing a "Stop+N" at boot-time to reset OBP to defaults if you haven't already. That may clean out something that's making it act crazy.


Hmm... That didn't work either. Still the same error.
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 11, 2005 9:27 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Did you try another disk ? Maybe install Solaris on it to see how that works ?
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 13, 2005 11:38 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

It doesn't matter what I put in, it will *always* give the same errors with either disk boots or net boots. I'm going to try to write the flash image to CD directly and boot from that.</longshot>

In any case, does anyone know a way to flash the OpenBoot PROM from within a running Linux? Right now I'm stuck booting the LiveCD and chrooting to get stuff running.

** edit

Well shit, that didn't work. Can someone explain to me (or point me to an explanation of) how to make a bootable CD out of the flash images that I've accumulated?
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zaanpenguin
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PostPosted: Thu Jul 14, 2005 11:54 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Anyone? How can I make a bootable CD from a flash PROM image?

I don't have a Linux box with a burner in it to do this, but I do have another x86 server running Linux on it to create an ISO if needed...
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Risk
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 1:47 am    Post subject: no such animal Reply with quote

Sorry, if all you have are Sun PROM images there is not a way to make that bunch of code into a bootable disk. I suggest you download the Solaris 10 install and initialize a spare disk. From there, place the PROM update (not "images") onto the disk root directory and then reboot.

At the OK prompt, you should type something like:

Code:
boot disk /flash-update


changing "flash-update to whatever your PROM update filename is.

This will likely also solve your unbootable Sun machine problem as it seems to me you've either:

1) used the wrong PROM update flash programs for your system (not all Ultra systems use the same PROM)

2) caused an offset or mismatch in your flashing of the PROM the first time somehow

Good luck
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zaanpenguin
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 1:52 am    Post subject: Re: no such animal Reply with quote

Risk wrote:
Sorry, if all you have are Sun PROM images there is not a way to make that bunch of code into a bootable disk. I suggest you download the Solaris 10 install and initialize a spare disk. From there, place the PROM update (not "images") onto the disk root directory and then reboot.

At the OK prompt, you should type something like:

Code:
boot disk /flash-update


changing "flash-update to whatever your PROM update filename is.

This will likely also solve your unbootable Sun machine problem as it seems to me you've either:

1) used the wrong PROM update flash programs for your system (not all Ultra systems use the same PROM)

2) caused an offset or mismatch in your flashing of the PROM the first time somehow

Good luck


I would, but the problem with that Solaris-solution is that I don't have a SUN mouse and therefore I cannot change focus to the install window and do that. Solaris will auto-boot into X, you see ;)

Also, like I've said before: this is 100% without question or any hint of uncertainty the *RIGHT OBP* for this system. It *recognizes* the system correctly, it was *listed* as being the right OBP on the SUN pages. It just doesn't boot from disk or net correctly ;)
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 2:15 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

zaanpenguin - you have some rather interesting problems.

if indeed you are unable to "change focus to the install window" (isn't there a simple keystroke for this e.g. CTRL-TAB?), I suggest you unplug the keyboard and plug in a serial console instead. This will, at least, get you up and running with a version of Solaris so that you can reflash the PROM and see if that cures the disk booting problem.

p.s. One other thing you may try is to set all of the PROM variables to defaults and then try booting again.
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zaanpenguin
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 10:21 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Risk wrote:
zaanpenguin - you have some rather interesting problems.

if indeed you are unable to "change focus to the install window" (isn't there a simple keystroke for this e.g. CTRL-TAB?), I suggest you unplug the keyboard and plug in a serial console instead. This will, at least, get you up and running with a version of Solaris so that you can reflash the PROM and see if that cures the disk booting problem.

p.s. One other thing you may try is to set all of the PROM variables to defaults and then try booting again.


No, sadly there are no keystrokes for it. It doesn't seem to be a normal version of X, else I would've been to move the mouse around with CTRL-Numlock, for instance. I really do seem to need a mouse for this.

I've already reset the variables to their defaults with 'set-defaults', but that doesn't solve the problem. In fact, they were already set to their defaults.

Installing Solaris will not fix this: if I install Solaris and then put the flash image on it, I would still need to boot from disk. I cannot boot from disk or net, as I've said already. I'm in a bit of trouble :)

The only way possible way out right now, is to boot from a CD that has the flash image on it. That's why I'm asking if someone can tell me how to make a simple bootable CD that will start the flash updater. It needs to be a CD without SILO, because SILO cannot start flash update images (I've already checked this). This has to be possible somehow, since SUN used to provide these CDs in the past.
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 4:57 pm    Post subject: Creating a SPARC Bootable CD Reply with quote

Hmm, try this then:

http://www.lka.ch/projects/solcdburn/solcdburn.html

or

http://mah.everybody.org/docs/bootable-cdrom-for-solaris

(these links were working as of 15 July 2005)
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 5:13 pm    Post subject: Re: Creating a SPARC Bootable CD Reply with quote

Risk wrote:
Hmm, try this then:

http://www.lka.ch/projects/solcdburn/solcdburn.html

or

http://mah.everybody.org/docs/bootable-cdrom-for-solaris

(these links were working as of 15 July 2005)


Yep, but they both seem to assume a running Solaris to make the CD. I don't have that, no things like /dev/dsk/... etc. I have absolutely no clue what to do from those guides. I just don't understand them, sorry... :( I only have a running Linux machine and a Windows machine to make a CD.
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 6:16 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

alright, I have an interesting update to this issue as I am experiencing the exact same problem on my U60 Creator3D 2x450 512M RAM 2x18G HD machine. I am using the same version of OBP; however, I do not think this is an OBP version issue. Here's why chronologically:

1.) I had solaris on the machine when I was using it to do some Sol10 testing and it had OBP 3.26 or something like that
2.) before I offed solaris I used it to upgrade the OBP to 3.31.0 as it is also the version sun says to use on my machine
3.) I installed gentoo completely and when I rebooted it worked perfectly; I even got it working with a 2.6 kernel
4.) I tried setting up software raid and made a mistake that caused a recurring problem on my disk, so I tarred up my entire installation and put it on my debian server via nfs (to use in the same way you use an install stage - I call it a stage 4 install;-)
5.) I decided to be lazy and try debian sparc on this machine; It appeared to install fine, but when I rebooted it gave me this "not executable" problem. I tried debian again thinking maybe it missed running of the silo command; this time debian bitched about not being able to install silo (some kind of fatal error). OK, at this point I cursed debian a bit and went back to gentoo at which point I realized debian (using parted via their partman install module) completely rewrote all of the hard drive's parameters. Sooo, I cursed debian some more, and popped in a solaris install cd that griped about the disk label not matching the actual cylinder count. Well, I just wanted it right so using the solaris format command I completely reformatted the disks and did a surface analysis. After damn near 8 hours of running, it came back and said the disks were clean and no bad spots were found (yay! so I thought). I went back into gentoo and setup my partitions on /dev/sda at which point I mounted them at /mnt/gentoo, shared /mnt/gentoo via nfs with my debian server; I then untarred my gentoo installation I'd saved previously into this shared directory. This worked great; I went ahead and resync'd portage and ran an update to make sure my stage 4 install worked and it did. I unmounted everything and went ahead with setting up my software raid on all partitions; that worked great too. Once all the partitions were in sync, I remounted my gentoo install via my /dev/md devices. Everything still worked great, so I re-emerged silo and setup my silo.conf file for my new partition scheme and raid. I ran `silo -f` and it appeared to work well (said my config file looked good as it usually does), so I was happy and unmounted everything and rebooted.
6.) After all this I still have the same problem, but as I mentioned above, it worked fine with the currently installed OBP before I reinstalled. So what gives?
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 6:33 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

btw, can someone tell me the command I can give the livecd's silo in order to boot "my" installation directly rather than having to go into the livecd and chroot to my disk. This would be much easier than chrooting while we work on getting this issue resolved. Speaking of which, one step I took that could have been the catalyst was after untarring my system and chrooting into it, I resync'd and updated it. I do not know if silo was among the packages upgraded, but it could be that I upgraded to a new version of silo that has a bug with this OBP version whereas the silo before it did not. :?:
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 6:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

jbwillia wrote:
btw, can someone tell me the command I can give the livecd's silo in order to boot "my" installation directly rather than having to go into the livecd and chroot to my disk. This would be much easier than chrooting while we work on getting this issue resolved. Speaking of which, one step I took that could have been the catalyst was after untarring my system and chrooting into it, I resync'd and updated it. I do not know if silo was among the packages upgraded, but it could be that I upgraded to a new version of silo that has a bug with this OBP version whereas the silo before it did not. :?:


It sounds like you're having the exact same problem as me in that regard. Does netbooting a TFTP image work for you btw?
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PostPosted: Fri Jul 15, 2005 7:02 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I haven't tried netbooting via TFTP ... I've actually never done this in linux before (only in solaris); I would have to do it via my debian server, and that's an x86. This shouldn't be a problem (I really don't know seeing I've never done it in linux) except that I would also have to rewrite a lot of my firewall and figure out how to boot via TFTP in linux (something I'd like to know but don't necessarily have the time).

Anyways, we know the silo on the livecd works, so we should be able to boot our installations from the cd's silo prompt. I've just never done it as I've never needed to. I'd like to know what options to give it in order to do this...?

HMMMM!!! something just occurred to me....OK, let's roll over and check....interesting, my OBP boot-device environment variable is set to "disk cdrom" so this means that when OBP failes to boot disk it should automatically do cdrom. However, it doesn't do this; I have to manually type 'boot cdrom' ... this isn't a real big issue, but it is a problem none the less.
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