Hi,
I wanted to add to the thread that contrary to my former expectations my
booting problems didn't reach a happy ending. After a few reboots, the
machine stopped booting again, despite the entire OpenSolaris partition
now being located in low sectors.
I observed today that the fsys_zfs.c code in GRUB actually take liberty
to read *beyond* the last sector of the partition, while looking for
"best uberblock" and on other occassions too (why? bug?).
So I hacked it to keep within the boundaries. Now, despite being able to
find /platform/i86/kernel/unix and find /platform/i86/boot_archive in
the hacked GRUB console, the only result that I get from issuing the
'boot' command is a black screen and a blinking cursor.
I suppose that maybe something (ZFS implementation?) within the kernel
is also reading from the high sectors of the disk early, but I don't
feel adventurous enough to find out.
The summary is that on some systems with buggy BIOS, OpenSolaris will
install properly, boot correctly a few times and then simply stop
booting. No workaround seems to exist to keep it from happening. If you
have such a system, better don't install OpenSolaris on it.
Unfortunately, you probably won't even find out until you have tried it.
Best regards,
Jan Ploski
Jürgen Keil wrote:
Jan Ploski wrote:
Using primary/secondary disk didn't make any difference.
However, I managed to fix the problems ...
In short: it is possible to install and boot OpenSolaris on a secondary
master (even if it also contains some Linux RAID partitions in front,
which I thought might be adding to confusion). It *may* be a problem
though to boot anything from a partition in high-numbered sectors
("high" being an overstatement: the last addressable sector was just
66059279 in my case, well below 40 GB).
Interesting...
IIRC, there was some kind of 32GB limit with x86 hw / bios / fdisk / ata disks
Maybe that limit is the root cause of the problem?
http://www.allensmith.net/Storage/HDDlimit/Limits.htm
http://www.allensmith.net/Storage/HDDlimit/63Sector.htm
The numbers do not match exactly, however
65535 cyl * 16 hd * 63 sec = 66059280 total sectors;
which matches the first unreadable sector on
your system....
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