How to revive my E450

Toby Thain toby at telegraphics.com.au
Sun Oct 25 10:07:11 CDT 2015


Hi,

I have an Sun E450 with 4 cpus installed that ran fine for a few years 
as a Solaris 10 box with ZFS boot. About 4 years ago I mothballed it and 
pulled the two boot drives out to store (ZFS was in a mirror configuration).

This weekend I decided to see if it would come up again.

Predictably, the NVRAM is dead. "The IDPROM contents are invalid"
And it's forgotten its mfg-options. (I found info by Googling that this 
should be set to 49 for E450.) I'll have to do something about that.

More surprising to me than the NVRAM failure though was that it produces 
the same result when I try to boot from either drive:


   ok boot disk
   Boot device: /pci at 1f,4000/scsi at 3/disk at 0,0  File and args:
   Bad magic number in disk label
   Can't open disk label package

   Can't open boot device


It seems unlikely to me that both disks have died. Does anyone have any 
other ideas? Could it be related to the NVRAM failure?

Here's what I haven't tried yet:
- I haven't checked disk jumpers
- I haven't tried to mount the disks and check them on another machine. 
This could be a bit of work, but I can get around to it.

It's a long time since I set up this Solaris/ZFS install. Maybe I've 
forgotten some quirk of booting ZFS on old SPARC. Any suggestions welcome.

(also posted to Sun Rescue list)

--Toby


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