When booting an Oracle Solaris system with the retained memory pseudo-device (for example, when the system is attempting to recover from a failed boot pool). The boot archive on the target boot environment might be out of sync. The boot archive SMF service will automatically rebuild the archive, then reboot. Instead of rebooting from the boot pool, the system erroneously attempts to reboot from the (now-nonexistent) retained memory device. This situation causes the reboot to fail, and the user is dropped to the ok prompt.
In order for this condition to occur, two situations are required:
The boot archive on the target boot environment is out of sync.
The system is booting with a boot archive stored in retained memory as a result of booting from the fallback image stored on the SP (OpenBoot boot alias 'fallback-miniroot').
If this condition occurs, you will see this error:
{0} ok boot fallback-miniroot NOTICE: Entering OpenBoot. NOTICE: Fetching Guest MD from HV. NOTICE: Starting additional cpus. NOTICE: Initializing LDC services. NOTICE: Probing PCI devices. NOTICE: Probing USB devices. NOTICE: Finished USB probing. NOTICE: Finished PCI probing. SPARC S7-2, No Keyboard Copyright (c) 1998, 2016, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. OpenBoot 4.40.2, 125.2500 GB memory installed, Serial #XXXXXXXXX. Ethernet address 0:10:e0:XX:XX:XX, Host ID: XXXXXXXX. Boot device: /@300/@1/@0/@2/@0/@1/@0,0 File and args: SunOS Release 5.11 Version 11.3 64-bit Copyright (c) 1983, 2015, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. NOTICE: Configuring iSCSI to access the root filesystem... NOTICE: successfully copied and retained the boot_archive into memory, rebooting ... rebooting... Resetting... NOTICE: Entering OpenBoot. NOTICE: Fetching Guest MD from HV. NOTICE: Starting additional cpus. NOTICE: Initializing LDC services. NOTICE: Probing PCI devices. NOTICE: Probing USB devices. NOTICE: Finished USB probing. NOTICE: Finished PCI probing. SPARC S7-2, No Keyboard Copyright (c) 1998, 2016, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. OpenBoot 4.40.2, 125.2500 GB memory installed, Serial #XXXXXXXXX. Ethernet address 0:10:e0:XX:XX:XX, Host ID: XXXXXXXX. Boot device: /reboot-memory File and args: SunOS Release 5.11 Version 11.3 64-bit Copyright (c) 1983, 2015, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. NOTICE: Configuring iSCSI to access the root filesystem... An inconsistency in the boot archive was detected and the boot archive has been successfully updated. Rebooting syncing file systems... done rebooting... Resetting... NOTICE: Entering OpenBoot. NOTICE: Fetching Guest MD from HV. NOTICE: Starting additional cpus. NOTICE: Initializing LDC services. NOTICE: Probing PCI devices. NOTICE: Probing USB devices. NOTICE: Finished USB probing. NOTICE: Finished PCI probing. SPARC S7-2, No Keyboard Copyright (c) 1998, 2016, Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. OpenBoot 4.40.2, 125.2500 GB memory installed, Serial #XXXXXXXXX. Ethernet address 0:10:e0:XX:XX:XX, Host ID: XXXXXXXX. Boot device: /reboot-memory@0:nolabel File and args: ERROR: /reboot-memory@0: No reboot memory segment. Evaluating: Can't open boot device {0} ok
Recovery: Type the boot command again at the ok prompt.