Solaris is very touch about changing the Boot Slice.
Boot up in single user mode BOOT -S. This will give you a chance to fix anything that should not be there.
You need to boot from your install CD. Insert the Solaris Software CD in your CDROM drive. If your CDROM drive/bios isn't bootable, first insert the "Device Configuration Assistant" (DCA) diskette. At the "Boot Solaris" menu, choose "CD."
At the "Type of Installation: Interactive or Jumpstart" menu, type "b -s"
Or, after the video configuration, network, time and date you'll notice one of the menu's has a button: [Exit] Select Exit and, when it asks you again "do you want to exit?," just say yes.
Once you're at the UNIX root prompt #, you can mount the boot drive with "mount /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 /mnt"" and view anything wrong with the boot drive (omit the "t0" for ATAPI).
1. Boot from CD-ROM and get the root prompt, #,
2. Determine the controller, disk number, and partition. The boot disk is /dev/rdsk/c?t?d?p? where ? is the controller #, target ID, and disk #, and partition #. Omit "t?" for ATAPI E.g., /dev/rdsk/c0d0p0
3. Verify it's the correct device correct with prtvtoc for the drive: This is VERY important; if it's wrong, you you may hose another partition: prtvtoc /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0p0 (omit "t0" for ATAPI, always use p0, which means the "entire drive"). The prtvtoc prints out the map for the Solaris partition on the hard drive, if found. The partitions shown on the output are actually "slices" within the Solaris partition.
4. Restore the boot block as follows:
/sbin/fdisk -b /usr/lib/fs/ufs/mboot (raw disk dev)
E.g., for SCSI it might be:
/sbin/fdisk -b /usr/lib/fs/ufs/mboot /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0p0
(omit "t0" for ATAPI)
5. Finally, remove your CDROM and diskette media and type "reboot". The Solaris Multiple Device Boot Menu should appear after rebooting. If not, you can always to an upgrade (re-)install.
Note: This procedure does NOT make your Solaris partition active again (sometimes needed after installing another operating system, such as Windows, on the same disk), it just writes to your bootblock IN your Solaris partition. To learn more about the Solaris boot process, read the boot(1M) man page.
Well, actually, the "Boot Assistant". The interface is similar, but not identical, to SPARC Solaris' OpenBoot 'boot' command. The main differences I notice are:
It's "b -r", not "boot -r", if you want to force reconfiguration. Why would you want to do that? Well sometimes, if your devices have changed a LITTLE, you might want to do this. You can also invoke it with a "touch /reconfigure" as root before rebooting.
You don't have nice device aliases like you do with Sparc hardware. That being said, if you do nothing, it should autoboot into the actual OS in a few seconds. Or you can type something quickly within 5 seconds, and force a "reconfiguration boot", as mentioned earlier.
The "Driver Assistant" or whatever, really looks for major changes, like adding or removing a card. However, if, say, you add another disk drive, you'll probably want to just do "b -r". Note that the Device Assistant will itself trigger a "b -r", after it has autodetected hardware changes.
