Sun Fire X2270 Can’t Boot Solaris

You’d think a brand new Sun box would be able to boot a freshly installed Solaris, wouldn’t you? Think again.

Last week I took delivery of two new Sun Fire X2270 servers. They sport dual quad core Intel Xeon 5500 “Nehalem” processes.

They are both missing the ILOM cards, because Sun are having quality issues with them – they’ll be shipped when they have a new firmware released which addresses whatever issues they’re having. This means there’s no graphics output, and no service processor to ssh to. I have to have the servers next to my desk hooked up to my mac via a serial cable. (I could put them in the data centre but without a service processor I wouldn’t be able to remotely power them on and off).

It would seem that they can’t boot Solaris from their local disks! They can do a network boot though, which is how I’ve been doing the installations as they don’t a CD / DVD drive. But once the installation is complete and they try to reboot, nada, just freezes.

I’ve tried the following builds of Solaris:

• Solaris 10 Update 8 (10/09)
• OpenSolaris 2009-06
• SXCE (Solaris Express) b105

My most recent attempt was Solaris 10 Update 8. The tail end of the installation looks like this (from my serial console window):

Solaris 10 software installation succeeded

Customizing system files
- Mount points table (/etc/vfstab)
- Network host addresses (/etc/hosts)
- Environment variables (/etc/default/init)

Cleaning devices

Customizing system devices
- Physical devices (/devices)
- Logical devices (/dev)

Installing boot information
- Updating boot environment configuration file
- searching for UFS boot signatures
- no existing UFS boot signatures
- Installing boot blocks (c0t0d0)
- Installing boot blocks (/dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0)

Installation log location
- /a/var/sadm/system/logs/install_log (before reboot)
- /var/sadm/system/logs/install_log (after reboot)

Installation complete
Executing SolStart postinstall phase…
Executing finish script “patch_finish”…

Finish script patch_finish execution completed.
Executing JumpStart postinstall phase…

updating /a/platform/i86pc/boot_archive
syncing file systems… done
rebooting…

Then it reboots and just leaves the following on the console, forever:

Speed : 2.00 GHz    Count : 2

Press F2 to run Setup (CTRL+E on Remote Keyboard)
Press F12 if you want to boot from the network (CTRL+N on Remote Keyboard)

I’m logging a call with Sun! I wonder if they’ll help given I have hardware only support.