[geeks] AAAARGH! new drives in an Octane!

[Kurt Huhn]

> Did you perhaps have a slice listed in /etc/fstab that would have
> referenced that SCSI ID?  For example, were you replacing a disc?
> 

Nope.  Nothing referenced this drive in /etc/fstab - that's what made it
so wierd.  This was a new disk, going into an empty (not previously
used) slot.

> The panic didn't tell why it decided to flail its arms in agony? Normally,
> there's a message like "panic: out of palatable ale" just before the dump.
> 

Nothing human readable anyway.  It didn't get far enough to display the
'Irix 6.5, blah, blah' in the lower right.  As soon as it tried to boot,
it tossed a panic.  There seemed to be soemthing in there regarding
geometery, which led me to perform the action below...

> > It dawns on me to try boot into sash and fx the drive before booting.
> > Viola!  It works.
> 
> In that case, it definitely sounds like your Octane was trying to mount a
> filesystem on there, and got horribly confused due to the lack of a volume
> header and disklabel.
> 

Yep, and nope.  It was certainly confused by the disk. I pulled it from
a Sun machine at the office in order to load some files on there and
sneaker-net them back to the office.  When I wrote an appropriate label
on the drive, all was okay.  My best guess is that it read the label on
the drive, got an upset belly, then puked it's guts out.  

I suspect, but don't have the time to try this, that any other drive
with a Solaris label on it will make it perform similar actions - and
isn't limited to this 36GB drive.
-- 
Kurt
kurt at k-huhn.com