SUMMARY: mirrored disk booting/bad SCSI errors problem

From: Adam and Christine Levin (levins@westnet.com)
Date: Fri Jul 23 1999 - 07:58:13 CDT


Thanks so much to all who responded. Below find brief summaries of
everyone's advice. Special thanks to Marco Greene for all of his
responses. He and Sean Burke were right about getting that alternate
mirror to boot. According to Sun's docs, I should use the device pointed
to by ls -ld /dev/rdsk/c0t8d0s0, which was /pci@1f,4000/scsi@3/sd@8,0:a.
However, it turns out I must use /pci@1f,4000/scsi@3/disk@8,0. That
worked like a charm. Also, the boot blocks hadn't been installed, because
I had tried swapping the disks physically in the machine and the second
disk didn't boot. However, after running installboot, the swap did work.

We still haven't solved the errors, however. We've at least managed to
confirm that it isn't the disks themselves. I'm going to try to convince
Sun to try new controllers and cables.

Once again, thank you all.

Summaries:
Barry Gamblin <bgamblin@hao.ucar.edu>
        check for bent pins on the cables and terminators
"Leonard, Roger" <rleonard@cvty.com>
        Did you put a bootblock on the second disk with installboot?
Birger Wathne <birger@sdata.no>
        Suspect a cabling problem rather than disks
Thomas Carter <tcarter@memc.com>
        your detach/attach should work, just watch for db's (i've done it)
Robert Hill <Robert_Hill@cch.com>
        if they're on the same controller, replace the controller
Bruce R. Zimmer <bzimmer@all-phase.com>
        Check for scsi problems -- loose cable, bad term, wide dev after narrow
Wade Stuart <Wade.Stuart@osagemn.com>
        There's an infodoc on booting from a mirror
Jeff Kennedy <jeff.kennedy@natdecsys.com>
        Had similar problem, labelled disk in format and it worked.
Arthur Darren Dunham <add@netcom.com>
        Make sure boot blocks are there and the metaroot was run to make mirror
        Also try swapping physical disks in machine
dharringt@deq.state.va.us
        Listed commands for using SDS and mirrored drives
Kevin Sheehan {Consulting Poster Child} <kevin@joltin.com>
        Almost certainly a cable or bus problem.
Marco Greene <mgreene@sympatico.ca>
        your detach/attach should work, just watch for metadb's
        try different boot device (disk@8,0 instead of sd@8,0 with no :a)
SEAN BURKE <ITNSB@mailer.rgu.ac.uk>
        I had to boot with different device than the ls gave.

-Adam

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