[indiana-discuss] [install-discuss] OpenSolaris 2008.11 fails to boot on USB disk

[Dave Miner]

Sean Liu wrote:
> Hi there,
> 
> Since my SATA controller is not supported by OpenSolaris, I downloaded the usb image from genunix and copied to a USB stick, then used the stick to install it to a Western Digital USB disk partition. (I installed opensolaris 2008.5 to the partition on a dell laptop before and it worked fine BTW)
> 
> 1. After the installation, the disk would not boot at all (nothing shows on the screen)
> 2. I booted up the stick and installed grub to the disk (with -m option), after reboot the screen shows "GRUB" then stops, there is no menu at all.
> 3. After reading this message https://www.opensolaris.org/jive/message.jspa?messageID=311082 , I did following:
> a. zero'ed out the whole partition (s2) with "dd"
> b. reinstalled opensolaris 2008.11
> 4. After reboot, nothing shows on screen again
> 5. Booted into stick, downloaded the grub binary attachment, installed the grub ( with -m ), reboot, same sympton as step 2. (Only GRUB on screen, nothing else)
> 
...
> 
> Any ideas why it can't boot? Any help is appreciated.
> 

Take a look at bug 4755:

http://defect.opensolaris.org/bz/show_bug.cgi?id=4755

which has some additional possible workarounds.

Dave