Resolving ZFS Mount-Point Problems That Prevent Successful Booting (Solaris 10 10/08)

The best way to change the active boot environment is to use the luactivate command. If booting the active environment fails due to a bad patch or a configuration error, the only way to boot from a different environment is to select that environment at boot time. You can select an alternate BE from the GRUB menu on an x86 based system or by booting it explicitly from the PROM on a SPARC based system.

Due to a bug in Oracle Solaris Live Upgrade in the Solaris 10 10/08 release, the inactive boot environment might fail to boot because a ZFS dataset or a zone's ZFS dataset in the boot environment has an invalid mount point. The same bug also prevents the BE from mounting if it has a separate /var dataset.

If a zone dataset has an invalid mount point, the mount point can be corrected by performing the following steps.

How to Resolve ZFS Mount-Point Problems

1. Boot the system from a failsafe archive.

2. Import the pool.

   For example:

   # zpool import rpool

3. Look for incorrect temporary mount points.

   For example:

   # zfs list -r -o name,mountpoint rpool/ROOT/s10u6 NAME MOUNTPOINT rpool/ROOT/s10u6 /.alt.tmp.b-VP.mnt/ rpool/ROOT/s10u6/zones /.alt.tmp.b-VP.mnt//zones rpool/ROOT/s10u6/zones/zonerootA /.alt.tmp.b-VP.mnt/zones/zonerootA

   The mount point for the root BE (rpool/ROOT/s10u6) should be /.

   If the boot is failing because of /var mounting problems, look for a similar incorrect temporary mount point for the /var dataset.

4. Reset the mount points for the ZFS BE and its datasets.

   For example:

   # zfs inherit -r mountpoint rpool/ROOT/s10u6 # zfs set mountpoint=/ rpool/ROOT/s10u6

5. Reboot the system.

   When the option to boot a specific boot environment is presented, either in the GRUB menu or at the OpenBoot PROM prompt, select the boot environment whose mount points were just corrected.