Solaris 10 x86 won't boot.

Question

Hello,
I just installed Solaris 10 x86 on a brandnew disk, but the system will not boot. After generating lots of errors, it flips back to Grub. I managed to catch some error messages:
Tue Oct 14 00:13:57 WEST 2008
Oct 14 00:07:09 schille gda: [ID 107833 kern.notice]      Requested Block 4637010, Error Block: 4637025
Oct 14 00:07:09 schille gda: [ID 107833 kern.notice]      Sense Key: ICRC error during UDMA
Oct 14 00:07:09 schille gda: [ID 107833 kern.notice]      Vendor 'Gen-ATA ' error code: 0x16
Oct 14 00:07:09 schille gda: [ID 107833 kern.warning] WARNING: /pci@0,0/pci-ide@f,1/ide@0/cmdk@0,0 (Disk0):
Oct 14 00:07:09 schille      Error for command 'read sector'     Error Level: Retryable
These errors are repeated many times, for many different disk blocks.
Funny thing is, my old disk had the same problem, therefore I just bought this brandnew disk. It is a WD Model : WDC WD1600AAJB-00PVA0, Revision : 00.07H00.
I 'm not using this disk within a serial ATA configuration.
Since the Award Phoenix BIOS version is quite old (2003), I am beginning to suspect the problem might be there.
Does this look familiar to anyone?
I 'll look forward to your comments.
Thanks, Bram

Answer 1

Just for the record: The problem is solved.
I went on looking for more info on this message:
Oct 14 00:07:09 schille gda: [ID 107833 kern.notice] Sense Key: ICRC error during UDMAAnd then found an interesting post from 2004 by Juergen Keil:
The "bad block detected" message appears to be an old/obsolete error
message text, somewhere in the Solaris "ata" driver.
The ATA-1 standard (1997?) defined the 0x80 bit in the IDE
controller's error register as "bad block detected". (See page 32 on
<URL:http://www.t13.org/project/d0791r4c-ATA-1.pdf>)
The 0x80 bit seems to be "reserved" (undefined, not used any more)
with ATA-2 and ATA-3.
ATA-4 and newer now defines this bit 0x80 as ICRC "interface CRC error
has occurred during an Ultra DMA data transfer" when using ultra dma
transfers. (see the description of the "READ DMA" or "WRITE DMA"
command in <URL:http://www.t13.org/project/d1153r18-ATA-ATAPI-4.pdf>).
The Solaris ata driver seems to interpret the 0x80 bit according to
the old / obsolete 1997 ATA-1 standard.
So the "bad block detected" message seems to be a hint that some sort
of data corruption is happening on the IDE interface during UDMA data
transfers with the HDD. With UDMA capable disks it apparently does
not mean "the disk drive is dying".
I went to search what could cause a hardware datacorruption on my system and found that my internal removeable disktray was making bad contact.
After replacement everything worked as expected.