I moved my PCI host adapter to another slot and the system won't boot!

I moved my PCI host adapter to another slot and the system won't boot!

Don't move the adapter. It isn't a supported feature in Solaris and
isn't easy to recover from. If you have any choice in the matter, move
the controller back to it original slot.


The PCI device number is part of the device's basic ID, including its
child disks. If you change slots, you've effectively removed that
controller and its disks, and added an unrelated controller and disks.
You need to fix up all of the references to the old disks to point to
the new disks.


I've never come up with any strategy better than "boot, observe failure,
fix failure, reboot" for recovering from this kind of change. For simple
cases (single controller, in particular) it can be helpful to clear
/dev/dsk/* and /dev/rdsk/* and run "disks", but that is perilous too.


Incidentally, changing motherboards is likely to trip exactly this
problem, because motherboards generally number their slots differently.


To conclude, it's difficult and dangerous, and the general guidelines
involves fixing:



  1. /etc/vfstab or /dev or both
  2. /devices to match one another
  3. possibly removing lines from /etc/path_to_inst in order to make
    the right /devices nodes show up


The ultimate goal is to get back the same controller numbers as before.


[Sun FAQ 2576-02 at http://access1.Sun.COM/cgi-bin/rinfo2html?257602.faq]



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