[OpenIndiana-discuss] Hard shutdown now no boot

[Harry Putnam]

Jim Klimov <jimklimov at cos.ru> writes:

> 8 августа 2015 г. 10:03:34 CEST, Harry Putnam <reader at newsguy.com> пишет:
>>Running OI a9 on HP xw8600
>>
>>Following a hard shutdown from power outage; attempted boots produced
>>an error message indicating a problem with the onboard battery and
>>that the date was way off.
>>
>>On booting to bios I discovered the date was on zeros all around.
>>
>>AFter resetting the date to its (then current) figures, a new boot
>>went on to the point of bringing up the grub screen with possible
>>versions to boot, defaulting to the most recent listed.
>>
>>That bootup brings up the opening screen of OI boot with the graphic
>>of a completion gauge. That is, a white heavy walled long thin oval
>>with a heavy white line inside.  All on a blue background and with
>>ilumos logo visible in lower right corner.
>>
>>On previous normal boots, that heavy white line turns red begining at
>>the left and progressivly turning red to the right until the OS
>>suddenly appears.
>>
>>Currently, I see the white line turning red for about the first inch
>>and then a sudden reboot takes over.
>>
>>In other words, I'm unable to boot my OS beyond the first stages.
>>
>>I haven't had this kind of trouble for very long time and have
>>forgotten how to perform an emergency boot.
>>
>>Further, once I've made an emergency boot I suspect the OS time is
>>still completely off and possibly causing the unwanted sudden reboot.
>>
>>So a few main things:
>>
>>1) How to get booted?  Is it just a matter of booting from the old a8
>>   iso then mounting some parts of the current os enough to chroot in
>>   and sets the time/date and see if that cures things? 
>>2) Assuming I get an emergency boot accomplished... what do I need to
>>   mount to be able to chroot in and set time/date?
>>
>>3) Is there a proceedure required for setting time/date on Solaris
>>   that is different from linux in major ways? 

JK wrote:
> My first guess about such behaviour would be to replace the CMOS
> battery (usually CR2032 on PCs) and review the bios settings. I'd bet
> a bit that you have the rpool on sata disks, and the bios reverted
> back to its defaults (legacy ide or native sata) which is the opposite
> of what you'd installed illumos with.

Harry asks:
Is there some diffinitive way to determine if cmos battery is bad?

I mentioned in previous post, that the bios date was all zeros, and
that I was able to successfully set the date to where in repeated boot
attempts ... checking the bios date shows the date is current... would
that be true if battery was bad?

> If you have a bootable (distro) cdrom or usb stick with sufficiently
> recent OI, I suggest setting native sata in bios, and if it is not the
> variant your rpool expects - boot from this other media and do the
> usual trick of import-exporting the rpool. 

Can you explain that 'trick' a little more?.. I boot with cdrom
media, import my old rpool... am I required to mount some portion of
the old os on temp mount point? if so,  Which part of old OS?
Does the importing bit follow any required mounting?

Any amount of detail you have time to supply about the process would
be very well appreciated.. googling has shown me some confusing
results.  

> Note a cdrom would be
> preferential - lack of one essentially blocked my ability to set
> native sata on my laptop for years until recently - putting an usb
> stick caused enumeration of my disks to be different than when the
> rpool is alone during boot, so it broke boot anyway. Firefly saved my
> day for that, though ;)

Unless there has been a newer iso releases... (last time I checked
was several months ago) bld 151_a8 was the only ISO available.  Would
that old build be sufficient to mount/import etc?

The problem OS is 151_a9 with, I think, two updates.   It hasn't been
successfully booted now for a couple of months.