I had this working before. I have a 120GB disk with Solaris on the first primary partition, Fedore Core 3 on the second, Slackware on the third, And FreeBSD 5.3 on the 4th. Booting was handled by grub, and everything was working fine.

I decided to wipe everything out and start from scratch because I didn't like the way the partitions were layed out and I didn't like the way the Solaris slices were layed out within the Solaris partition.

So I repartitioned the disk and installed Solaris 10 on the first partition like I had it before. The install went fine, I booted it, logged in, made some minor changes, like clicking on the StarOffice icon to install that app, made a loghost or logname file in /etc, and enabling XDMCP from the graphical login configuration application. Then I rebooted.

Now it will not boot. I get this:

If I let it time out, it gives this:

then it resdisplays the screen.

I have only been playing with Solaris 10 for a very short time, so I am unfamiliar with it. How can I tell why "File not found"? And more importantly, what can I do to fix it?

Thanks.

You can try manual booting of the system by typing "b kernel/amd64/unix" (assuming x86 version of Solaris 10) at "Select (b)oot or (i)nterpreter:" prompt

No dice. I tried

kernel/genunix
/kernel/genunix
genuix
/genunix
kernel/amd64/genunix

All give me

I can boot the CDROM and then it'll boot.

I'm thinking there might be something wrong with the mbr on the hard disk. How do I check it and correct it if necessary?

I now know what's wrong, but I do not know how to fix it.

I made the following discoveries:

In the "intepreter" mode, I type "set" and can see all the variables. def_bootfile was set to 'now', which explains why I get the error message "can't run now".

I can boot the CDROM, and when I do, it's def_bootfile is 'kernel/unix'

So I changed the def_bootfile to 'kernel/unix' and I am able to boot.

However, every time I reboot, def_bootfile gets reset to 'now'. How to I make it permanent?

Solaris 10 reads the boot variables from a file called: /boot/solaris/boot.rc. You may have to play with that file a bit

Also you may need to check (and edit) the value of "boot-file" in /boot/solaris/bootenv.rc

The problem and solution in Cliff's Notes format:

Problem: System would not boot. It gave Running "set" in the boot interpeter showed def_bootfile and rb_file were both set to "now".

According to /boot/solaris/boot.rc
So where was "now" coming from?

When I rebooted, I ran shutdown -r now. Well, in Solaris, "-r" is not a legal flag for the shutdown command, so I ran reboot now.

Solution: Do not specifiy "now" as an argument to the reboot command.