Sun e3500....Failed boot drive, how to retrieve data on remaining 7 drives.
I've got a SUN E3500 that's been running perfectly for the past year. However, We lost power and my UPS didn't last long enough and the machine shut down "uncleanly". When I rebooted, it said "invalid WWN number 0 0", or something to that effect. After doing some reading, does that mean the boot hdd is corrupt? If not, how do I get around that? I've tried doing a "boot -s" with the SUN Solaris 10 installation disk, and could get into a single user shell. Then I did a "format" command, and it only brought up 7 of the 8 drives. I'm assuming that means the boot drive is shot? How do I mount the remaining drives to retrieve my data? It's not a lot of data, probably 50mb or so. Thanks!
[702 byte] By [
chuddy117a] at [2007-11-26 15:10:30]
# 1
Hi,
Was the bootdisk not mirrored at all ?
Good practice is to mirror your bootdrive so you can always boot off the mirror.
Otherwise maybe you can boot off cdrom and mount the other drivers on /a or /mnt if you can still remember where you had a filesystem on.
Regards,
Nico
# 2
Thanks for the reply, it was definitely a stupid mistake on my part for not mirroring the boot drive. I'm definitely a newb when it comes to Solaris and Sun hardware! What is the correct syntax for mounting? I did a "mkdir hd" in the tmp directory, then did a "mount -F ufs /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 /tmp/hd", but nothing would mount. I'm wondering if i'm even using the correct syntax? I've tried specifying the filesystem, and NOT specifying the filesystem. Nothing seems to be working?
# 3
Hi,
After you booted it with cdrom and did a format you said you could still see 7 of the 8 disks right ?
So the format should list the disk devices you can still mount.... the rootdisk is that still in there also or does it not show you anything for the rootdisk.
For mounting a disk device you should first be sure that a filesystem is on that disk.... but then you should just be able to do :
mount /dev/dsk/c1t1d0s0 /a
that should be working.
Regards,
Nico
# 4
Yep, I could see 7 of the 8 disks. I'm ASSUMING the boot disk wasn't part of those 7, as the machine doesn't want to boot. Is there a surefire way to tell which disk is the bad one? You mention "rootdisk", does it say that anywhere I can look for? Also, a thought just occured to me. In case my data ends up being on the boot disk, would it be possible to put Solaris 10 on a new disk, and pull ALL the drives out except for the new disk and the "broken" boot disk? Then, mount the boot disk and extract data that way? Thanks!
# 5
Hi,
Well, if the disk is really rotten then you can't mount it anyway.
You won't be able to extract data from it if it isn't even seen in format.
You can try installing solaris 10 on one of the other disks but i don't think that will get you much futher in getting of the data from the broken drive.
I thought you were trying to get to one of the 7 drives you could still see.... the bad drive will probably be unmountable.
Regards,
Nico
# 6
I'm not quite sure if the data I need is on the boot disk or one of the remaining 7 disks....can't quite remember:/ I've installed Solaris 10 on an old disk I had lying around, and put the "bad" boot disk back in. After booting it up, I did a stop-a and did a "probe-fcal-all". BOTH disks showed up. Maybe I just need to understand the basics, once i'm in Solaris, how do I FIND the physical drives? Where do they show up? /dev/dsk maybe? And how do I know which C*T*D*S* is which drive? Thanks!
# 7
**UPDATE**
Now i'm really confused. I just put the original "bad" boot disk in the disk 0 slot, and it booted up no problem. It errored out because /usr and several other directories were on different drives, but it actually booted that far. Do you think it's just a flakey drive? My initial problem was that it showed up as having an invalid WWN 0 0 number, so it tried booting off the net. Maybe the env has the wrong WWN number for some reason? Is there a way to update the WWN number somehow so it sees disk 0 (boot disk) ? Thanks!@
# 8
Hi,
Indeed disks show up in /dev/dsk or /dev/rdsk, /dev/rdsk being the raw disk devices and /dev/dsk being the normal devices that are mountable.
If you do an ls -ltr on /dev/dsk you should see that it links through to a path that usually begins with /devices/......./sd@....... if i can recall correctly. The sd at the end might contain a very long number... if so then this could be the WWN. Also, if you check the disks physically then the WWN might be on the bracket (if the bracket was never swapped with another bracket that is, otherwise the WWN might not correspond with the WWN of the disk). In the OBP you can set the boot-device to the one you want with devalias/nvalias. If you know the full path to the disk then you can change the default boot-device to be the correct one with the correct WWN.
Hope this helps a bit,
Regards,
Nico
# 9
Thanks again for all your help, NicoB. I finally got my data off, the data was in different "slices". Thanks again!
