Short disk read - HELP please!

From: Shanti Suresh (shanti@umich.edu)
Date: Wed Aug 27 2003 - 12:11:19 EDT


Hi folks,

I have an Ultra10 here which was fine until, I believe, a power outage.
It just won't boot up. Here is a summary of the problem and what I've
done so far.

The OpenBoot PROM is version 3.15 on a Sun Ultra10, 360 Mhz machine.
When I boot the machine, I get:
-------------
Short disk read
failed to read superblock.
failed to read superblock.
failed to read superblock.
Boot load failed.
The file just loaded does not appear to be executable.
--------------

I booted from a Solaris2.6 cdrom.
I fsck'd the "/" filesystem and it had problems reading sectors 7, 16
and 17. So I aborted the fsck, used an alternate superblock of 32,
and got it fsck'd. I then did an "fsck /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0" and
things are fine.

I am able to boot from CDROM, mount "/" under "/a"
and things look good. Also, "lost+found" in
"/a/lost+found" is empty.
I also did an "installboot", just to be on the safer
side. I mounted "/" under "/a", also created a clean copy of
"ufsboot" from cdrom into "/a"(i.e. "/").

Booting now says the same thing:
------------
Short disk read
failed to read superblock.
failed to read superblock.
failed to read superblock.
Boot load failed.
The file just loaded does not appear to be executable.
------------
I booted from the CDROM.
Ran "format", and saw the priamry drive. It is a
0. c0t0d0 SEAGATE ST39140A cyl 17660 alt 2 hd 16 sec 63
(8.49 GB)
I selected the drive, labelled the drive. Rebooted.

Same errors as in the beginning, starting with "Short disk read"
and ending with "The file just loaded does not appear to be executable".

The superblock is really not bad, at least as reported by "fsck", and
"lost+found" being empty. So "Short disk read" is what the problem is.
My "/" partition is only 100MB.

Oh, and I also checked the device alias for "disk" and the
OpenBoot parameter for "boot-device". They both look good.

Luckily, I was able to read the "/" filesystem when mounted under "/a".
So maybe I backuped it up that way onto another partition.

Since I wanted to upgrade the machine to Solaris2.8,
I reloaded the Solaris2.8 Operating System onto the hard-drive. The
"initial install" formatted the drive fine and loaded the Core operating
system. However, on a manual reboot, I still get the same error
messages starting with "Short disk read" and ending with "The file
just loaded does not appear to be executable". This time, two sets
of these messages.

I'm wondering what else I can try. I've got to get this done quick
to make a few people here happy. So any help would be great.

Thanks.

                                                     -Shanti

-- 
Shanti Suresh
E-mail: shanti@umich.edu
IT Communications Services
Information Technology Central Services
University Of Michigan
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