SUMMARY: X4500 (thumper) boot drives

The short answer is that it seems you can only boot from
either slot 0 or slot 1 on the X4500 (thumper).

Mike Brodbelt noted that the X4500 documents discuss using
the eeprom command to set an alternate boot path, but notes
(as I had) that on Sun's x86 servers this information is
stored in /boot/solaris/bootenv.rc *ON THE FILESYSTEM*.
Since the filesystem isn't available until after boot, it's
unlikely that setting this would have the desired effect.

Thanks to:

  Scott Lawson
  Mike Brodbelt
  
for their responses.

Sean Walmsley

ORIGINAL QUESTION:
>
>Does anyone know if it's possible to boot an X4500 Thumper
>from disks other than the ones in slots 0 and 1?
>
>As far as we can tell from looking at the BIOS interface,
>only the drives in slots 0 and 1 can be selected to boot from.
>On other Sun x86 boxes (e.g. our X4450s), the BIOS seems
>to probe for available drives and list all that it finds.
>
>We've looked through the manuals, and although they make
>specific mention of booting from slots 0 and 1, they don't
>actually come out and say that you can't boot from other
>drives. Similarly, the chassis has labels warning that
>slots 0 and 1 *MAY* be boot drives which to our minds
>suggests that there may be alternatives.
>
>The reason for this question is that we periodically run a
>"copy boot disk" script which clones the boot drive to a
>second drive and performs housekeeping to make the clone drive
>bootable in situ. Since slots 0 and 1 both reside on the
>same controller, we'd prefer to use one of the 40 other
>drives in the chassis that reside on a different controller
>for our boot clone to in order to improve redundancy.
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