When Solaris boots the following happens

- MBR (Master Boot Record) 1st sector on disk containing partition
table is loaded.

- This loads lilo

- You select Solaris partition

- This loads the first sector on the Solaris parition (pboot program)

- This loads the bootblk program FROM THE PARTITION MARKED
ACTIVE.

****If when Solaris boots the partition marked active is not the 
Solaris partition you get the error

Can't load bootblk 

***There is no need to run anything like installboot since LILO does 
NOT overwrite the pboot or bootblk programs.

*** If they do get overwriten.

Boot from the Solaris CD Software Disk 1 of 2.
At the first prompt
1. Interactive Install
2. Custom Jumpstart 

enter

b -s

and this will boot into single user mode.

Then 

cd /usr/platform/i86pc/lib/fs/ufs
installboot pboot bootblk  boot-device

The boot device is of the form /dev/rdsk/c?d?s8
For me with one IDE disk this is  /dev/rdsk/c0d0s8


NOTE: IF you just want to boot Solaris ONLY then

/sbin/fdisk -b /usr/lib/fs/ufs/mboot /dev/rdsk/c0d0p0

and the (Master Boot Record) 1st sector on disk containing partition
table gets overwriten and only Solaris will boot.

*** To restore the lilo boot manager

- Boot Linux floppy
- At boot prompt
mount root=/dev/hda2 ro
- Login as root
- run 

/sbin/lilo -L -P ignore

again and the /etc/lilo.conf file is used again.

David.

PS: I'll write this up properly later and will add this to
my Web Site (www.smooth1.co.uk) in the next few days!
Installing the above 4 operating systems has taken 3pm-11pm
(with TV breaks!).



Solaris booting
============

Each Solaris parition contains 8 'slices' i.e. sub-partitions.
slice 8 is use to store the startup boot stuff.

Solaris 8 booting is

mboot sits in the Partition Boot record (the sector which contains
the partition table) and this loads the boot sector from the active partition.

A Solaris partition is

pboot                            (boot sector)
2 sectors  of VTOC   (Virtual Table Of Contents) which
                                      lists the 'slices' in this partition)
bootblk program.      (Kinds like IO.SYS)

pboot loads bootblk which is more than one sector long and so 
large enough to understand Solaris filesystems.

bootblk loads the rest of Solaris....

eventually the kernel gets loaded (kinda like MSDOS.SYS)
and this eventually loads the X-Window system and give you
a Windows type screen.

Note slice 8 in the Solaris partition is of type boot and contains
pboot and bootblk

To Fix
---------

1. Get an fdisk program (The best one is the one on the Windows
ME boot disk - it understands big disks > 33Gb).

2. Make sure the Solaris partition is marked active.

3. Also repair the Solaris stuff with


Set PC to boot from CD Drive.
Put Solaris 8 Software disk 1 of 2 in the CD drive and boot from it
When you get the choice

1. Interactive Install
2. Custom Jumpstart


then enter then secret incantation

b -s

This will boot ' single user mode' i.e. a command.com like shell prompt.

You see messages like 

Configuring /devices
Configuring /dev

as Solaris analyses your hardware.

It this point when you get to a # prompt do

1. Find your boot slice with 

ls /dev/rdsk/c?d?s8 

one of these is the CD (not writable) another is the slice you need.

2. Run

cd /usr/platform/i86pc/lib/fs/ufs
installboot pboot bootblk  boot-device

This fixes pboot and bootblk

To fix the partition boot record (mboot) do

1.  ls /dev/rdsk/c*d*p*

The devices containing  c*d*p* are fdisk partitions 1-4.
You probably need one ending in p0. 

Call this boot-device2

2. Run

/sbin/fdisk -b /usr/lib/fs/ufs/mboot boot-device2

3. Reboot with init0.