Infrastructure Software

Hello,

After several gyrations of installation attempts and dealing with early BIOS PnP issues, I've finally managed to get Solaris 10 x86 installed on an old dual P2 333Mhz system. So far the system is running flawlessly, but I'm still not able to boot directly off the SCSI disk. The primary boot handler is erroring out that it cannot find boot.bin.

I can boot fine off of the IDE CD drive and the floppy (currently pointed to autoboot into the SCSI disk as a workaround). But when I try to boot directly off the SCSI drive, I get the error from the Solaris boot manager that it "Cannot find boot.bin".

I have booted off the CD & Floppy and compared the /boot files from both the CD & floppy, but I cannot find any difference that would prevent the primary boot loader from finding boot.bin. I've even compared files to make sure they were not corrupt, and even force re-installed the boot handlers, and manually partioning, always with the same results. I've also tried both enabling and disabling the DOS >1G translation of the Adaptec SCSI BIOS with no change. I can't find any reason that the boot loader is not seeing boot.bin, or that the file is corrupt in any way (even after several wipe and install attempts).

My System is:
Supermicro P6DLS dual Pentium II 333MHz & 512MB RAM, w/ Adaptec 7880 SCSI-UW and IDE (whopping UltraDMA 33) interfaces.
CD/DVD reader is configured as the secondary master (moved from primary master in an attempt to fix boot problem)
HD is a 16GB UW SCSI disk.
(Other particulars ommited unless someone feels they are relevant to the boot process).


The system came to me with Windows 2000 installed and functioning. I also had Fedora Core 3 installed, both with no boot problems of the SCSI disk. (Although FC3 would not see the second processor even with the canned SMP kernel).

This system is intended to replace a Fedora Core 3 system to be a multi-purpose firewall gateway & proxy server and I'm really liking the performance I'm seeing with Solaris 10 on this system but would like it to be able to go through a normal boot process and not have to depend on a floppy as a boot device to get started.

Anyone have any ideas why the Solaris x86 boot loaders think that they cannot find boot.bin when the full /boot partion is intact?

TIA,

-Troy