Question:
We have a Sun Workstation with either Solaris 8 or Solaris 9. There
was a power glitch and ever since the system won't boot.
I tried for each of the disks in the show-disks
setenv boot-device disk
boot -s
I kept getting the error message "Can't open boot device";
Answer:
If the system won't boot, the root password will not help. If you can
boot from CDROM, you can change the root password.
What madel "Sun Workstation" are we talking about?
What happens when you put an install CD in th drive and type:
boot -s cdrom
Try:
printenv boot-device
...at the OK prompt. That will show you what disk you're booting off of.
Also, if you have more than one disk in the system, it's possible that the
second one is a mirror of the OS. In that case, you can boot from that disk
instead. Probably "boot disk1" will do it, but the "showdevs" command will
confirm it.
Try typing "devalias" at the ok prompt. That is supposed to show all
current device aliases. cdrom should be one of them. Is that alias
present? Is it pointing to a CDROM drive?
What model "Sun Workstation" are we talking about? It just might
possibly be relevant!
It looks as if one of your disks, or your SCSI bus, has developed problems.
Boot from CDROM and see if you can mount any of your disks. It's
possible that something corrupted the boot block but that the O/S is
still intact. This can be repaired, I believe, by running installboot.
If the O/S is no longer on the disk or if it has been corrupted, you
will need to restore from backup or reinstall Solaris.
Have any changes been made to the hardware since it last worked?
Disconnecting an external disk or a tape drive could have left the SCSI
bus unterminated which would probably prevent the system from booting.
