Felipe Alfaro Solana

Today one of my OpenSolaris boxes could not get to the GRUB menu. Instead, I was dropped at the GRUB prompt. I tried running:

bootfs rpool/ROOT/opensolaris
kernel$ /platform/i86pc/kernel/$ISADIR/unix -B $ZFS-BOOTFS

But this was failing with a “inconsistent file system structure” error. I searched the Internet and found ZFS rpool Upgrade and GRUB. What I did is booting from an OpenSolaris CD, then tried to import the rpool ZFS pool:

mkdir /tmp/rpool
zpool import -R /tmp/rpool rpool

But this was failed with an error message that indicated someone else might be using that ZFS pool. To force the import I used the following command instead:

zpool import -f -R /tmp/rpool rpool

This time it worked flawlessly and I could check the GRUB menu.lst file was in place and looked okay. So, before trying to rebuilt the boot archives or reinstalling GRUB, I rebooted the box. This time, the GRUB menu came up and I could boot the system. I’m not entirely sure what happened yet.

Since I installed OpenSolaris on the HP Proliant DL180 G5, I’m constantly having problems with init 5 not being able to switch power off on shut down. Today, while searching a bit to see if anyone else had this problem, I came up with the following thread: Shutting down PC. The comment by perksta is the most useful one:

Hi there,
I too was having this issue, hanging on shutdown. My setup is a ASUS P5E3-WS-Pro with QUAD core Q6600 2.4Ghz with AOC-SAT2-MV8. I found this blog :-

http://masafumi-ohta.blogspot.com/2008/10/workaroundeee-901-has-shutdown-problem_08.html

about an ASUS eee 901 which was worked around by offlining the extra cores before shutdown.

add “/usr/sbin/psradm -f 1 2 3″ before “init 5″ line in the file “/usr/lib/hal/sunos/hal-system-power-shutdown-sunos”

This has worked for me consistently now (about 20 shutdowns) I am using Solaris Express CE build 103.

I still get lots of ‘svc-syseventd stop’ errors during shutdown but at least it turns off reliably

To keep it short, running:

pfexec /usr/sbin/psradm -f 1 2 3
pfexec /sbin/init 5

Seems to do the trick, although I confess I’ve only used it a couple of times. Time will tell if this workaround works reliably or not.