silo read error on block <number>... results in a short read
 

Preamble

This relates to an installation of Aurora 2 Sparc (2.6.13) onto an Ultra5 with 512M RAM and a 333MHz CPU. The HDD is SCSI connected to a Symbios PCI card. Ordinarily the Ultra5/10 would use a vanilla IDE HDD.

Ran the install program from the DVD and all was fine. The HDD is divvied up as:

/dev/sda1 /
/dev/sda2 swap
/dev/sda3 /usr
/dev/sda4 /home

Upon completion of the installation the boot sector is written and it tells BIOS where to boot.

Fault

Upon booting I get this:

Boot device: /pci@1f,0/pci@1/scsi@1/disk@0,0:a file and args:
SILO
Read error on block 1647259182

Couldn't load /etc/silo.conf (attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in a short read)

Troubleshooting so far

Booted the CD again to rescue mode and ran badblocks against all the partitions. Then I ran e2fsck -c -k -d -p -v against all the partitions. I've been unable to format or partitions the disk so that the bad blocks are bypassed.

How do I do that? Is this what I have to do?

:-) Peter