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Boot device cannot be opened

Early in the boot process, immediately following system initialization, there may be messages similar to the following:

SCSI device 0,0 is not responding

Can't open boot device

The following are common causes for the system PROM being unable to read the boot program from the boot drive:

• The boot disk is not powered on.
• The SCSI bus is not terminated.
• There is a controller failure of some sort.
• A disk is failing and locking the bus, preventing any disks from identifying themselves to the controller, and making the controller assume that there are no disks attached.

The first step in diagnosing this problem is to check carefully that everything on the SCSI bus is in order. If disks are powered off or the bus is unterminated, correct the problem and reboot the system. If one of the disks has failed, remove the disk from the bus and replace it.

If no hardware problems are found, the error is probably due to data errors on the boot disk. In order to repair this problem, attempt to boot the system from an alternate boot disk (containing a mirror of the root volume). If you are unable to boot from an alternate boot disk, there is still some type of hardware problem. Similarly, if switching the failed boot disk with an alternate boot disk fails to allow the system to boot, this also indicates hardware problems.