🚀 go-pugleaf

Craig Dewick wrote:

> In <36180AF2.2A29@zipworld.com.au> fister <fister@zipworld.com.au> writes:
>
> >I have just swapped over a 1GB seagate st51080N out of a pc, changed its
> >ID to 3  & = installed it in a sparc LX. When the LX boots up the
> >following appears
>
> >bad magic number in disk lable
> >can't open disk lable package
> >can't open boot device
>
> >also i forgot to delete the fat partition before i removed the disk from
> >=
> >the pc.
>
> It sounds like it's trying to boot off the disk (since it found one at SCSI
> ID 3), and is not succeeding in finding anything that looks like a valid
> SunOS disk label. There shouldn't be anything wrong with the drive itself.
>
> The Solaris install program that fires up automatically if you boot from a
> SunOS 5.x (aka Solaris 2.x) CD-ROM takes care of the mechanics of formatting
> your disk (as a front end to the 'format' and 'mkfs' commands) once you
> decide how you want it set up.
>
> The 'format' program supplied with SunOS 5.6 should automatically query the
> drive for it's format parameters and use them as a default, which takes a
> lot of the hard work out of setting up SCSI drives. All SCSI drives (except
> for very old ones) can return their format parameters to a SCSI host when
> queried.
>
> It can be all done manually, but there are a lot of steps and unless you
> want to do something unusual, it's not worth the trouble.
>
>

Some Sun hosts will goof when the disk label isn't exactly as expected, returning
"bad magic number", especially when that drive is the only drive and is ID3. For
instance, my Sparc AXi did that on a brand new Seagate Cheetah drive. I hooked it
up to a SparcClassic as an external drive and repartitioned it there.

First, try hook up the drive as anything other than ID 3 or 6, 6 for the CDROM.
Boot off CDROM and do a "format" to partition the drive.

2nd, try hook up that drive to another Sun as a secondary drive and partition it
there, then put it back to the goofy host as ID 3. Remember to always use "boot
-r" whenever there is hardware added/removed.

I believe another post last week on comp.sys.admin solved a similar problem with
the 2nd option, like I did.


Jonah