Subject: Re: What's "Can't find /packages" mean?
To: Todd Vierling <tv@wasabisystems.com>
From: Grey Wolf <greywolf@siteROCK.com>
List: port-sparc
Date: 09/07/2000 16:18:22
On Thu, 7 Sep 2000, Todd Vierling wrote:

# On Thu, 7 Sep 2000, Greywolf wrote:
# 
# : Did all that.  back to sd@3,0 == 1GB ST31200W, and it works.
# : sd@1,0, still a ST32171W, reports Cannot find /packages.
# 
# This may sound insanely weird, but does sd@1 have a disklabel that has all
# partitions on *exact* cylinder boundaries?  That is, when looking at the
# output of "disklabel sdN", nothing in the partitions looks like this:
# 
#   c:  4196405     1000     unused        0     0         # (Cyl.    1 - 4197*)
# 
# (the '*' indicates 'not on a cylinder boundary'; sparc disks should NEVER
# have '*'s in the cylinder number comments)

To clarify:

- I know that this is not a disklabel problem.  sd@1 has been in here
  for ages.  But FWIW, yes, they're all aligned.

- The message comes from the PROM, not the bootloader.

I shall probably have to go out and find a SPARC wizard who knows what
manner of black magic this be, but I thought I'd try here first to
see if any of our resident SPARC gurus might have encountered this before.
L1-D, L1-N and reset-defaults have proven fruitless.

Is this a symptom, perhaps, of only certain kinds of SCSI disks having
been "blessed" by Sun?  I can't see that, really; all disks in question
are SCA -- the other three are 50-pin ribbon SCSI (narrow SCSI-2) in
a tower, and it doesn't give me any hassle about them.

# I *know* I've seen "The file just loaded does not appear to be executable"
# for a disk with bad partitions, and I may have seen "Cannot find /packages"
# before too, but it's been a while since I've dealt with that much sparc
# hw....


				--*greywolf;

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