"There were no defects to be found
Snapshot image froze without a sound"
-- J. Geils Band
I applied the recommended patch set on my Solaris 9 Ultra 10 this weekend. Typed reboot, the disks synced, and then... nothing.
So I wait, ever so patiently.
Still nothing.
So I hit the power button.
Still nothing.
So I switch off the power supply. Ahh, that did it. Power it back on, and...
Hmmm. No video. Uh-oh. Two hours to get a display back to the monitor. Okay, let's try again.
Why is it booting from the net? L1 A. Why is it hanging on probe-ide? Another hour testing disks in another system before concentrating on the machine's IDE bus. An hour or two later, the bus magically resets, and everything is golden. Time to boot.
I'm not exactly sure how I fixed either problem. But then again, I'm not sure how I broke them in the first place, so I'll call it even.
Kernel panic. Dump to disk! Oops, no dump device. Better reset before the user gets a chance to read what's on my screen.
Final tally. Lost the mirror. Corrupt boot partition. Ended up doing a complete reinstall. On the plus side, I confirmed I could read Sun SPARC UFS partitions under Linux x86. And I didn't lose any real data.
That was my Monday morning. And afternoon. And part of my evening. You'd think I would have had enough.
I picked up two monster disks to expand into. Problem is, I don't have any systems that will support them.
Well, I have one. My Windows machine, which I have pretty much have just for gaming. It'll support the drive size. Once the BIOS is updated, of course.
Follow the instructions to the letter. Double and triple check everything. Except whether it would save the old BIOS to floppy for restoration in case of an interrupted update.
System powers on. I see the banner indicating the new BIOS rev.
I still see the banner indicating the new BIOS rev.
I still see the banner indicating the new BIOS rev.
Sigh.
