[OpenIndiana-discuss] Hard shutdown now no boot

[Harry Putnam]

Lou Picciano <loupicciano at comcast.net> writes:

> Harry, 
>
> First, apologies. I should have provided you that explicit GRUB boot
> line, then stuck with you! No matter, you're further along now...
>
> I'm gonna use the Occam's Razor approach, and bet that you've blasted
> your SATA settings - and that fixing that will be your solution. AHCI
> and SATA passthrough seemed to do the trick on one of our old
> Gigabytes; again, settings and naming conventions will vary among
> mobos. Important in our case was to disable all on-board RAID,
> however; ZFS is giving us RAID, right?

(And so it was...)

Now my turn... I want to apologize to all posters for hemming and
hawing and greenhorning it up.. trying every ones patience.

Should have just changed the cmos battery first move instead of being
so chicken (maybe next time.. hehe).

I didn't really understand how easy that was to do... and how easy
handling any resulting resetting of sata issues etc might be.

Deep seated streak of chicken heart I guess.

Now, let me thank you all very much for the rich and full amount of
clues and advice you all offered.  A heck of a learning thing for me
and much of it will be reduced to basic notes and kept on hand.

And now to complete my query with a satisfied.... `IT WORKS':

Finally changed the cmos battery, reset the time/date and after much
memory prodding decided the bios had infact reset the sata emulation
settings.

I vaguely recalled something about a separate ide controller in
original setup a couple of yrs back... so crossed my fingers and
turned that on in bios Storage setup... and suddenly it all worked
just like it always did.

There really are only 3 possible settings;

,----
| Aside
|   RAID+AHCI
|   Separate IDE controller
|   Combined IDE controller
| 
| The first is the one the machine had reverted to... and was failing.
| I suspected `Separate' would be the one.... and turned out to be.
| 
| For the record... `Combined' also fails in that it ends up ignoring
| two major installed discs.
`----

So, trying them each in rotation is about the worst that could have
happened... I guess.

> Hint: Once you do arrive the solution, back up BIOS settings(!) Many
> BIOSes now have an on-board facility for doing so, in addition to a
> save-to-media option.

And a mighty fine hint it is too... now followed!!

Once again a hefty thanks to all posters for all the good advice and
input.