Clearing MBR and booting default drive

[tomatopi]

I had a V100 I originally setup using software RAID and it wasn't all that reliable. I followed the instructions at this website: http://kryo.se/e250/sparcraid.txt originally. It worked for a time, but rebooting after a power outage killed the entire system.

Now I'm trying to re-install it without raid and SILO keeps looking for /silo.conf.hdc (IDE rather than SCSI system). From what I can tell, SILO is always reading the MBR from hdc rather than hda. I have managed to make it boot by using boot disk0 at the ok> prompt, but I'd rather it automatically boot correctly. OpenProm is set to boot just disk.

Any clues to this one?

[tomatopi]

Nobody have any clues to wipe out the SILO MBR? I tried writing 0's to the beginning of the disk to clear the MBR like in DOS/Windows but all it did was clear the Sun disk label so the Sun MBR must be someplace else. This is a very annoying issue.

Peter

[ezod]

The way I understand it, when a SPARC system boots, it reads the auto-boot device stored in the PROM, then reads the 512-byte boot block from that device. If you're using SILO, the boot block contains SILO's first stage boot loader, whose only purpose is to find and load the second stage boot loader that does all the work.

So I could be wrong, but it sounds to me as if what you're really trying to do is modify the boot info in the PROM.

You might find what you're looking for in here (quick Google search):

http://docsun.cites.uiuc.edu/sun_docs/C/solaris_9/SUNWaadm/SYSADV1/p42.html
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Aaron Mavrinac (ezod)

[tomatopi]

I sort of figured that's how Suns booted. I check devalias and disk was pointing to my second IDE disk and not the primary drive. That's the part I really don't understand since it used to boot from the primary drive until I setup the RAID. I changed the prom to boot from disk0 (didn't know you could be that specific in the prom) and it does boot. I guess the way the PROM creates the aliases is still a bit of a mystery to me.