[rescue] Potential SVM issue in Solaris 10; anybody got a spud?

[Ahmed Ewing]

> Speaking of which, does anyone know of a reliable way to install Sun
> firmware onto a non-Sun disk?  We had similar trouble at last $ork
> when we tried to put some of the cast-off 18G Compaq disks into our
> Suns.  They'd work for a while, then crap out.  Fortunately we
> mirrored them against Sun disks, as we thought we might have trouble.
>
> I've read that trying to do this kind of firmware hackery is
> difficult, but figured that some of the rescuers may have tried, given
> our predilections for repurposing hardware.

I actually posed this very question to, IMHO, a fairly credible source 
(a Sun employee with a deep background in disk manufacture among other 
stuff, and occasional project ties with their HW Eng. group) a few 
months back. According to him, Sun has actually been successful in 
getting the disk manufacturers to implement minor physical changes on 
otherwise standard disks to suit their various OEM requirements.

Put another way, you may have two Seagate ST318203LC disks in hand, but 
if one of them was sourced from Seagate or a generic disk reseller and 
the other from Sun (and thus also carries Sun part number 390-0002 / 
540-4177 on it), there's a possibility that the latter features 
slightly different chips on the PCB even though the manufacturer part 
number is identical on both. This can preclude Sun firmware flashes 
from working properly (or at all) on non-Sun disks.

Obviously a back-channel communication, so take it as you may, but I'd 
say that YMMV big time based on the above. For at-home tinkering and 
"hardware repurposing" as we do, you might feel more comfortable going 
down that road, and you might get lucky and be have a successful 
flash... but personally I wouldn't bet production uptime or critical 
data integrity (read: your job) on it. :-)

-A