Problem with booting on SunFire 280R

Zares · n00b Joined: 15 Apr 2007 Posts: 1

I managed to install gentoo 2006.1 from Universal CD without connection to the network. I choose kernel 2.6.17 for compilation. Everything seems to be ok according to the manual for Sparc computers but after booting I got message "Can't open boot device" from OpenBoot PROM. I am not experienced with Sun architectures so my question is if the mistake is with linux (kernel or SILO) or rather with OpenBoot PROM?
I have OpenBoot 4.10.11. After running SILO silo.conf seems to be OK. I've tried commands like "boot disk", "boot disk1" and so on but without success. My kernel after compilation is big above 4MB but there is in manual that it shouldn't be a problem with kernel version > 2.6.3
Thanks in advance for any suggestions
Gentoo is my last hope to have Open Source software on this machine....

The only linux system which recognized the fiber chanel disks.

Reality · Posted: Sun May 20, 2007 3:17 pm Post subject: Can't open boot device

Hello, I also have a similiar problem. After installing the Gentoo system, which has been done successfully on other machines, the open boot prom says "Can't open boot device", and similiarly I cannot seem to find the correct syntax to initiate the sun box to start booting from the hard drive. I would imagine that SILO should take over right away just like on a PC...would there be an option somewhere or command that lets you check boot devices like in a PC bios?

The only problem I had during installation was with SILO complaining that /boot was not mounted (which had been done previous to entering the chroot environment), after re-mounting /boot to /dev/sda1 it no longer complained about that in particular, however there was another issue with SILO exiting on 'error 1'. (http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-sparc/msg_01504.xml), the reply on the mailing list was to emerge a sane e2fsprogs...which I was already using the regular version of, so I simply unmerged and then emerged e2fsprogs, and then SILO emerge'd with no problems. Could this be related?

/sbin/silo completed successfully

Edit: kernel 2.6.20-gentoo-r8

Anyone had a similiar experience that got fixed, or a more Sun knowledgable person out there?
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Steve (Reality)

dony · n00b Joined: 01 Nov 2006 Posts: 70 Location: Germany

I had the same problem when / starts at Cyl 1.

Now / starts at 0 (without /boot FS); after /sbin/silo (use /etc/silo.conf not /boot/silo.conf in my case) my Blade 1000 (same System-Board) booot's without Problems.

Dony

Reality · Posted: Wed May 23, 2007 2:05 pm Post subject: Sparc not booting from SILO

I was able to get my issue resolved, it involved inputting a few commands at the OK Open Boot Prom. I will try to repost the exact commands used, but basically changed the default boot device to the HD instead of the cdrom drive.
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Steve (Reality)