System Administration Guide: Basic Administration

ProcedureHow to Manually Update the Boot Archive on a Solaris Volume Manager RAID-1 (Mirrored) Root Partition

The following procedure describes how to mount a mirrored metadevice during a failsafe boot. In this procedure, the root (/) file system that is used is /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0.

  1. Boot the failsafe archive.

    Booting the system in failsafe mode produces the following output:


    Starting shell.
    #
  2. During the failsafe boot, when prompted by the system to select a device to mount, type q to indicate none.


    Please select a device to be mounted (q for none)[?,??,q]: q
    
  3. Temporarily mount a submirror of the root (/) file system as read-only on the /a directory.


    # mount -o ro /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 /a
    
  4. Copy the md.conf file to the /kernel/drv directory.


    # cp /a/kernel/drv/md.conf /kernel/drv/
    
  5. Unmount the /a directory.


    # unmount /a
    
  6. Use the devfsadm command to load the md driver.


    # update_drv -f md
    

    Running this command causes the configuration to be read, and the necessary devices to be created.


    Note –

    Before proceeding to the next step, wait a few seconds to ensure that the md driver has had time to load.


  7. Use the metasync command to ensure that the root (/) file system is in sync. For example:


    # metasync d0
    
  8. Mount the root mirror metadevice on the /a directory.


    # mount /dev/md/dsk/d0 /a
    
  9. Update the boot archive of the device that you mounted in the previous step.


    # bootadm update-archive -v -R /a
    

    If the boot archive fails to be updated, or an error message is displayed, do the following:

    1. Update the timestamp on the md.conf file on the /a directory, which forces an update of the boot archive.


      # touch /a/kernel/drv/md.conf
      
    2. Update the boot archive by running the bootadm command.


      # bootadm update-archive -v -R /a
      

      The update of the boot archive takes a few minutes to complete. If the boot archive was updated successfully, a message similar to the following is displayed:


      changed /a/etc/system
         cannot find: /a/etc/cluster/nodeid: No such file or directory
         cannot find: /a/etc/devices/mdi_ib_cache: No such file or directory
         Creating ram disk on /a
         updating /a/platform/i86pc/boot_archive
  10. Unmount /a.


    # unmount /a
    
  11. Reboot the system.