My Solaris 2.x x86 system will not boot after loading the SCSI/EtherLite driver, regardless of whether our SCSI units are on the bus or not


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My Solaris 2.x x86 system will not boot after loading the SCSI/EtherLite driver, regardless of whether our SCSI units are on the bus or not My Solaris 2.x x86 system will not boot after loading the SCSI/EtherLite driver, regardless of whether our SCSI units are on the bus or not

Believe it or not, this is actually a Sun bug, regarding scanning the SCSI bus at id's where there is no device. It is also specific to the x86 (Intel) version of Solaris 2.x. There is a bug in a number of Solaris X86 SCSI host adapter drivers which affects us. This is the scsi_probe() bug. The Sun Bug ID is 4022634. Sun says It will be fixed in Solaris 2.7 (coming soon).

HOWEVER, there is a relatively easy workaround NOT requiring OS re-installation or anything else equally unattractive.

The bug will manifest itself as system reboot upon driver load. Here's the workaround:

Boot the system with the "boot -a" command from the boot/PROM prompt. "-a" is the "ask" option.
As the system boots, agree to all the defaults except the one asking about the system file it is to use. Instead of the default "etc/system", tell it you want to use "etc/system_no_ct".
The system should boot without crashing, but without our driver (ct) loading.
Edit the /kernel/drv/ct.conf file so that it refers only to SCSI IDs at which Central Data units are installed. That is, if you have one unit at ID 4, delete (or comment out) all the lines that look like this
name="ct" class="scsi" target=N lun=0;

where N is NOT 4 (the SCSI ID our unit is set to).
Reboot the system and be happy.