BIOS unable to boot Solaris 10 after copying root disk
I want to copy the whole boot disk to another bigger disk but now BIOS is unable to see Solaris becasue of this "Not a UFS file system" error. Do you know why this is happening?
Motherboard: ASUS A7V133 x86
OS: Solaris 10 3/05
Old disk: 13GB (c1d0)
New Disk 40GB (c0d0)
I successfully copied root, /var, /opt and /home filesystems from the source root disk (13GB) to the destination root disk (40GB UDMA) using "ufsdump 0f - /dev/rdsk/c1d0sn | (cd /mnt; ufsrestore xf -)"
I then did the following steps:
1. fdisk -b /usr/lib/fs/ufs/mboot /dev/rdsk/c0d0p0 (new active boot disk)
2. installboot /usr/platform/i86pc/lib/fs/ufs/pboot /usr/platform/i86pc/lib/fs/ufs/bootblk /dev/rdsk/c0d0s2
3. Updated vfstab to point to the new disk slices
4. Updated /boot/solaris/bootenv.rc to point to the right physical IDE location of the new disk (ie change from setprop bootpath '/pci@0,0/pci-ide@4,1/ide@1/cmdk@0,0:a' to setprop bootpath '/pci@0,0/pci-ide@4,1/ide@0/cmdk@0,0:a')
I then rebooted and updated BIOS to boot from the new disk.
The machine then hangs and I am seeing this error "Not a UFS file system".
I looked everywhere on the Internet for useful tips but all said the same thing, to make a disk bootable you need to run installboot which is exactly what I did.
So what went wrong? Anyone out there knows please tell me? Thank you.
Trevor from OZ
[1448 byte] By [
Trevor_OZ] at [2007-11-26 10:48:22]
# 1
> The machine then hangs and I am seeing this error
> "Not a UFS file system".
>
> I looked everywhere on the Internet for useful tips
> but all said the same thing, to make a disk bootable
> you need to run installboot which is exactly what I
> did.
>
> So what went wrong? Anyone out there knows please
> tell me? Thank you.
First, if you boot off the older drive, can you mount the partitions from the new drive?
This will help make sure that they're all valid filesystems.
Also, have you looked at the man pages for grub and especially installgrub?
Tim
# 2
> First, if you boot off the older drive, can you mount the partitions from the new drive? This will help make sure that they're all valid filesystems.
> Also, have you looked at the man pages for grub and especially installgrub?
Yes I was able to mount the new paritions. fsck also passed them. The problem was BIOS not reading the new drive correctly for some unknown reason.
As a result, after agreeing to somone's advice, I decided to get rid of Solaris 10 3/05 OS and installed Solaris 10 6/06 OS which has the GRUB bootloader. It seems it has better boot management when choosing which disk to boot.
# 3
If you want to boot from your new disk, simple copy will not work.
It's because you need image copy of your disk uncluding boot sectors (thats why your OS does not boot).
You have to copy one disk to enother as image (not image file like *.ISO).
Excact image copy of file system can be done with special software like Norton/Symantec Ghost. Only with such software your new disk will be bootable with your original OS.
New disk must be from the same interface like the old one (usually SCSI to IDE and etc. does not work).
Other option is only to install your OS from a beginning on a new disk.
# 4
But if you replicate all slices from the old disk to another disk with the ufsdump/ufsrestore tools and you run installboot to copy the boot block to the new disk just to make it bootable.
Then you change the BIOS setting to boot off the new disk. It should work. That's what Solaris can do for you.
Mine is somewhat weird because when the BIOS tries to look at the new disk and then it immediately stops with the "Not a UFS filesystem" error without kicking in the OS yet ,despite the fact that the new slices are mountable from the old disk, therefore they are valid UFS filesystems. That is something I do not understand.
# 5
I am not familiar with ufsdump/ufsrestore tools.
But if you are replicating disk in few steps, it might be different from the original.
The problem is that your source disk could be fragmented and maybe that kind of copy puts files in different order than original (in un-fragmented order).
Thats why you need a tool that makes exact image copy of disk in one step.
