Fujitsu SPARC Enterprise T5140 Product Notes page 77

During a period extending from mid-September to early October 2009 (approximately 3
weeks) a patch was preinstalled on some SPARC Enterprise T5140 and T5240 servers, which
introduced a latent bug into those systems. The bug is described as "latent" because it is
activated only when the Solaris format command is used. Otherwise, the bug has no effect
on system behavior or performance.
When a system administrator or other user with root (/) privileges enters the format
command on a system containing this bug, the boot drive will report "drive type unknown".
This fault condition presents two problems for the administrator:
The administrator will be unable to access unused portions of the boot drive because of
■
the unknown drive type error.
The presence of mounted partitions blocks use of the format utility's auto configure
■
feature. Attempts to bypass this restriction by booting from the network or removable
media could put the system in an unbootable state.
The Workaround section below describes a procedure you can use to recover from this "drive
type unknown" fault mode without the risks associated with the network and media boot
methods.
Workaround: The sequence of steps shown in CODE EXAMPLE 1 must be followed
exactly as shown. To simplify tracking of the procedure, the steps are organized into nine
sections:
1. Determine whether or not the system's boot device is affected.
2. Shut server down and restart in single user mode with the root filesystem mounted
read only.
3. Mount the tmpfs /tmp filesystem to provide a working area.
4. Capture the boot drive's existing vtoc in a file stored in /tmp.
5. Make a copy of the fmthard utility for use in the /tmp work area.
6. Set and export the NOINUSE_CHECK variable to allow the format command full
access to the boot drive.
7. Run the format utility to restore the drive's "type".
8. Use the fmthard command and stored information to complete the recovery.
9. Verify the success of the recovery.
Procedure for Recovering a Boot Drive's "drive type"
CODE EXAMPLE A-1
1. Determine if the boot drive is affected:
root@host-1 # uname -a
SunOS host-1 5.10 Generic_141414-10 sun4v sparc SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise-T5240
root@host-1 # mount -p | head -1
Appendix A Fixed Issues 67