[OpenIndiana-discuss] Boot failure on Hipster upgrade

[Gary Mills]

I have a machine with an ASUS M2NPV-VM motherboard, running a Hipster
version that I installed from the 20160421 ISO.  It's using a new
video card with the NVIDIA GeForce GT 730 GPU, supported by the nvidia
driver.  Today, I tried to upgrade to the current Hipster in a new BE.
When I did the default boot of the new BE in GRUB, I got only these
two lines on the screen:

    SunOS Release ...
    Copyright (c) ...

The USB keyboard and mouse went dead after the boot.  The disk light
cycled slowly.  I had to hold down the power button to stop it.

When I tried a verbose boot (-v) from the GRUB menu, I got more
messages on the screen.  Some scrolled off, but I saw these:

    ...
    Reading Intel IOMMU boot options
    ...
    PCI Express-device: isa0 at a, isa0@
    ...
    /pci at 0,0/pci1043,81c0 at e :
    	SATA disk device at port 0
    	model  ST3160815AS
    ...
    	Supported queue depty 32, limited to 1
    	capacity = 312581808 sectors
    
There was a very long pause at this point with the disk LED out.
Again, the keyboard and mouse went dead early in the boot.

To recover, I booted the original BE through GRUB, and activated that
BE.

This behavior rules out the MBR/loader bug because only GRUB was used.

I'm guessing that the boot of the new BE disabled the USB devices and
that the OS then went into a loop enumerating devices.

The video card was not involved because the boot did not proceed to
the point where the resolution changed.

What would have caused this behavior?  What can I do now to enable the
upgrade to work, or even to debug the problem further?


-- 
-Gary Mills-		-refurb-		-Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada-