Booting from an alternate (mirror) boot disk on Solaris x64 systems


Booting from an alternate (mirror) boot disk on Solaris x64 systems
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On a Solaris x64 system, the alternate boot disk is added to the GRUB boot menu when a boot disk is mirrored. If one root disk fails, the system stays up and lets you replace the disk. No reboot is required to perform this maintenance with internal SAS controllers and other CRU-type drives that are hot swappable. Replace the disk, then rescan with the vxdctl enable command to discover the replacement.

Alternatively, the bootpath can be redefined in the EEPROM without changing the GRUB configuration.

Console access and the ability to select from the GRUB menu is required for the following procedure. The system should not have rebooted because of plex failure, but may have rebooted for other reasons.

To boot from an alternate boot disk on a Solaris x64 system

Select the "Alternate" GRUB menu entry:

title Solaris 10 11/06 s10x_u3wos_10 x64  <VxVM: Alternate Boot Disk> 
       root (hd0,0,a)
       kernel /platform/i64pc/multiboot
       module /platform/i64pc/boot_archive.alt

After the system has booted, replace the failed drive.
See the Veritas Storage Foundation and High Availability Solutions Troubleshooting Guide.

The boot process on x64 systems

From Update 1 of the Solaris 10 OS, x64 systems are configured to use the GRUB boot loader. The devices from which a system may be booted are defined in the GRUB configuration file, /boot/grub/menu.lst. From the GRUB menu, you can select from the available bootable partitions that are known to the system. By default, the system will boot from the device that is defined by the bootpath variable in the EEPROM.

Defining root disk mirrors as bootable

After creating a root disk mirror, you can make it available for booting.

On Sun x64 systems, VxVM automatically creates a GRUB menu entry for the alternate boot disk when the boot disk is mirrored. During the booting process, select the alternate GRUB menu entry from the system console.

An alternate method is to change the 'default' GRUB menu setting in the /boot/grub/menu.lst file to select this entry automatically during the booting process.

For details, see the Veritas Storage Foundation and High Availability Troubleshooting Guide.