jessea@rutgers.edu (Jesse W. Asher) (04/02/91)
I've had this happen to me a couple of times so I thought I'd better find out what's causing it. I've got a Sparcstaton 1+ running 4.1 and a couple of times when I've tried to boot the system from the PROM monitor prompt, I've gotten an error message like: checksun xxxxxxxxx != xxxxxxxxxx Trying to boot anyway. At least one time after I got this message, I then got a "memory out of alignment" or some such error and it refused to boot. I've had to reinstall everything each time after this has happened and, frankly, I'm getting a little frustrated with the frequency of this happening. Can anyone tell me why this is happening, what I can do to avoid it, and what I can do so I don't have to reinstall everytime? Thanx for any help for this poor, wretched, Sun-ignorant soul. Jesse W. Asher Phone: (901)386-5061 UUCP: ...!banana!hbmc!jessea
jms@tardis.tymnet.com (Joe Smith) (04/17/91)
In article <2293@brchh104.bnr.ca> dynasys!hbmc!jessea@rutgers.edu (Jesse W. Asher) writes: >I've had this happen to me a couple of times so I thought I'd better find >out what's causing it. I've got a Sparcstaton 1+ running 4.1 and a couple >of times when I've tried to boot the system from the PROM monitor prompt, >I've gotten an error message like: > checksun xxxxxxxxx != xxxxxxxxxx > Trying to boot anyway. >At least one time after I got this message, I then got a "memory out of >alignment" or some such error and it refused to boot. The message means that someone overwrote /boot and did not run mdec/installboot. The boot PROM does not know how to read Unix filesystem directories, therefore it cannot locate the /boot file by name. Instead, it reads in the first block of the disk, knowing that the executable code there has pointers to the blocks of /boot imbedded in it. The installboot program (found in /usr/kvm/mdec in recent SunOS releases) calculates and stores these pointers. Anytime the /boot file is overwritten (deliberatly or accidently), you must re-run installboot. Otherwise the PROM may load random garbage and die the next time you try to reboot. Joe Smith (408)922-6220 | SMTP: jms@tardis.tymnet.com or jms@gemini.tymnet.com BT Tymnet Tech Services | UUCP: ...!{ames,pyramid}!oliveb!tymix!tardis!jms PO Box 49019, MS-C51 | BIX: smithjoe | CA license plate: "POPJ P," (PDP-10) San Jose, CA 95161-9019 | humorous dislaimer: "My Amiga 3000 speaks for me."