Posting this circumvention in the hope it will be useful. Installed SXCR build 86 on an external Maxtor 160 GB USB hard disk. I did not select "use whole disk" but did consume the entire usable disk, so, as expected, I got a classical Intel-like MBR, with one partition table entry in it and that appears correct:
0x 80 00 01 01 BF FE FF FF C1 3E 00 00 00 4C A1 12 So we're startable, type 191, extents jive. Install had gone flawlessly, but the first boot of new system yielded "Bad PBR sig." Because it was not clear exactly how the Thinkpad BIOS was presenting the USB drive, I took a look at ...usr/src/psm/stand/bootblks/ufs/i386/mboot.S. From that, I tried the double-shift-down debug mode, which said, "LBA", and I determined that the USB drive was presented as 0x81 (0x80 being the internal HDD containing WinXP in a type 7 partition). Not really having time to research this properly, noticing that mboot.S forces drive 0x80, and not wanting to take the time to deal with assembling 16-bit real mode code on the fly, I simply zapped this MBR to force drive 0x81 instead of 0x80. Same Bad PBR sig. My next thought was to zap the je sigok (after readok:) to a hard jump, but quickly rejected that as reckless and very unlikely to work anyway. In the meantime I found another post with this circumvention: Boot install DVD (C)onsole out of GRUB Use chainloader +1 /and this worked/--the USB disk booted fine. But needing to keep the DVD around all the time would be a drag. I then tried entirely different MBR's, and placing GRUB's stage1 into the MBR via # installgrub -m /boot/grub/stage1 /boot/grub/stage2 /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0 worked. No DVD needed. I should note that even though GRUB's console sees this USB drive as hd1, Sol sees this drive as c0t0d0, as that command illustrates. I call this a circumvention since I haven't taken the time to research this fully--this could be related to 6413235 or others hitting near to that, but I think this is really just an issue of synergy between particular USB firmware, a particular BIOS flavor, and Solaris. Anyway, it gave me a bootable system :) Cheers, Jim This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list opensolaris-discuss@opensolaris.org
