Unix Articles & FAQ

I wanted to put a harddisk with an installation of Solaris 9 into another box.
Needless to say that Solaris didn't boot properly, since every single piece of
the hardware was different.

Here are the error messages I got and how I fixed it:

First when I booted the second machine with the harddisk I got the following messages:

    mount: No such device or address
    /dev/dsk/c0d0s1: No such device or address
    The / file system /dev/rdsk/c0d0s0 is being checked
    Can't open /dev/rdsk/c0d0s0
    /dev/rdsk/c0d0s0: CAN'T CHECK FILE SYSTEM
    /dev/rdsk/c0d0s0: UNEXPECTED INCONSISTENCY; RUN fsck MANUALLY
    WARNING - Unable to repair the / file system
    Run fsck manually (fsck -F ufs /dev/rdsk/c0d0s0)
    Exit shell when done to continue the boot process

OK, so I logged in with the root password and tried "fsck -F ufs /dev/rdsk/c0d0s0",
but it says there is no such device, albeit it is there in /dev.

When I quit the shell with "exit", I got this:

    resuming system initialization
    mount: No such device or address
    mount: Cannot open /dev/dsk/c0d0s0
    failed to open /etc/coreadm.conf: Read-only file system
    eeprom: cannot mkdir /boot/solaris Read-only file system
    INIT: Cannot create /var/adm/utmpx
    INIT: failed to write of utmpx entry: "   "
    INIT: failed to write of utmpx entry: "   "
    INIT: SINGLE USER MODE

I asked the folks at the Solaris-x86 mailing list for help and Laurent's solution
1.    Boot from the "1 of 2" Solaris installation CDROM by using "b -s"  (without the quotes)
    instead of "1" or "2" when asked for the  installation type

2.    mount the root boot partition at /mnt
# mount /dev/dsk/c0d0s0 /mnt

3.    Reconfigure the device tree:

# cd /mnt
# mv dev dev.old
# mv devices devices.old
# devfsadm -r /mnt

4.    Verify that the links /mnt/dev/dsk/c0d0s* to ../../devices/* exist.

5.    Type "rm /mnt/etc/path_to_install"   (or remove all lines but comments in this file)

6.    Remove the CDROM and /usr/sbin/reboot (if you removed /etc/path_to_install then, at
    the booting Solaris prompt, type "b -a")

The system should come up fine now!

One mistake I made was, that I didn't have plugged in the PS/2 mouse when booting with the
installation CD and while doing "devfsadm", so the X windows system failed to init.
Here is the error message I got when testing with kdmconfig :

Error opening "/dev/kdmouse"
Fatal server error: failed to initialize core device
XIO: fatal IO error 146 (connection refused) on X server "unix:0.0"
     after 0 requests (0 known processed) with 0 events remaining.

I booted with "b -r" to rebuild /dev and /devices and it worked!
(or "touch /reconfigure" and reboot)
worked very well. Thanks again Laurent! :-)