Fun with format (0 comments)
My pager sang to me at 5:48 this morning.
The server that had died was the same model as one I'd retired two weeks ago, so I swapped the dead server's disks into the other chassis and went on my way. As was to be expected, the unclean shutdown had left some filesystem errors, so Solaris kindly offered me a chance to fix them.
INIT: SINGLE USER MODE Type control-d to proceed with normal startup, (or give root password for system maintenance):
I gave it the root password and had a look around. Things looked reasonable until I tried the "format" utility to see what the system was calling all of its disks.
> format Searching for disks...done AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS: Unable to open /dev/tty.
That didn't make any sense to me, so I asked around the office. It didn't make any sense to David, either, so I asked the internet. From what I've gathered, it's a commonly-encountered issue in Solaris 8. It only happens when the system boot is interrupted and drops to single-user mode. Hitting ctrl-d to continue into multi-user mode gives a working format, as does rebooting into single-user mode. If the system is planning to stop at runlevel 1, everything's fine; only unplanned stops trigger this one.