[OpenIndiana-discuss] Z840 "fun". At least Solaris 11.4 works :-)

[Reginald Beardsley]

I decided that I'd had all of battling OI I could stand for now.

I tried installing Debian 10.9, but it would not boot from a 4 TB disk.  I guessed that when I saw the "install GRUB" dialog.  But, you don't know until you try.

I installed Solaris 11.4 to a single disk and did a "pkg install solaris-desktop".  Much to my relief, that came up using nVIDIA driver 384.111.  Not keen on the Gnome 3 desktop, but "pkg search mate" didn't find anything.  But is does give me a working OS to test the HW.  The Z840 is a 5-6 year old off lease system from ebay.  I've had good experiences with my 4x Z400s, but there's always the chance of faulty HW.

The BIOS on the Z840 will allow me to select which disk to boot, so I'm going to try installing that driver with Hipster 2020.10 and 2021.04-rc1 on other disks.

It really bothers me that the Live Image for 2021.04-rc1 works, but the installed image crashes.  Even more considering the amount of time I've committed to diagnosis.

Reg