[OpenIndiana-discuss] Reg's system recovery saga

[Reginald Beardsley]

Thanks to all for their advice and commentary.

I was  able to boot from the root pool to single user mode.  However, X11 did not come up and I got stuck at the nVidia splash screen.  I was able to take it down cleanly via the power button and booted back to single user mode via grub.

I am now scrubbing all 3 pools in single user mode.   I feel pretty confident that the cause of my troubles is a bad DIMM which suffers from bit fade.  The problem is the fade takes quite a while, so memtest86 hasn't been able to find it.  I've downloaded the source code to see how difficult it would be to add a fade test with a user settable delay between the write and the subsequent reads.

Once the scrubs finish I'll take the system down and run memtest86 to see if perhaps it can find the bad DIMM now.

I've now experienced several instances of systems running ZFS going down hard and recovering without a loss of data.  I think it's quite amazing.  The major issue I've had is it's been so long between system failures that I barely remember how to recover.

I'm hoping that after I finish the scrubs X11 will work without additional effort on my part.  Before I took the system off the internet I used to run twm on one screen and CDE on the other to keep applications dependent upon that happy.  I've always despised CDE and Motif in particular.  So changing to twm on both screens was a real pleasure.

Long ago, in a place far away, my day job required building X11R4 and Motif  on multiple platforms and distributing it internally for a major oil company.  It made getting laid off fairly pleasant.  At that time I knew my way around the maze of X11 startup files.  I'd hate to have to go in there again, but sometimes one must do things one would prefer not to do.

Have Fun!
Reg