topic Re: Fixing Solaris VM GRUB post mbralign in VMware Solutions Discussions

Fixing Solaris VM GRUB post mbralign

fletch2007 — Thu, 05 Jun 2025 07:12:18 GMT

Hi, we are aligning all our VMs with Netapp's mbralign tool.

We fix the linux grub with a Rescue "super grub" CD - but this does not work on the Solaris VMs

Error is: "Error 6 Mismatched or corrupt version of stage1/stage2"

I tried the manual steps (specifying the "a" slice someone mentioned in a solaris forum):

grub> root (hd0,0,a)

grub> setup (hd0)

but got the same error

Has anyone successfully aligned a Solaris VM??

thanks

Re: Fixing Solaris VM GRUB post mbralign

fletch2007 — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 22:34:53 GMT

I opened a case and was told Netapp does not support mbralign on Solaris (and to open a case with Sun)

This despite the fact the

NetApp® Virtual Storage Console 2.0 for VMware® vSphereTM Installation and Administration Guide

index lists grub as a step in the realignment process for Solaris

Solaris
reinstalling GRUB after running mbralign 58

the case engineer copy and pasted the steps to me from the guide and when I asked if he had tried those steps in the lab

(because I have many times and all Solaris grub fixes fail - or say they succeed and result in a non-bootable VM)

He then countered with the "Netapp does not support the Solaris grub fix - call Sun"

I have yet to hear of _anyone_ successfully aligning and grub fixing a Solaris VM into a bootable, aligned VM.

Since we have very few solaris VMs left this is not a huge deal for us - we're migrating all VMs to linux.

thanks

http://vmadmin.info

Re: Fixing Solaris VM GRUB post mbralign

adnovum — Thu, 29 Aug 2013 08:48:03 GMT

Hi,

Better a late answer than no answer: I successfully realigned a Solaris 10 x86 VM with ZFS pools and reinstalled GRUB using mbrtools from Netapp Virtual Storage Console 4.2 running on ESXi 4.1.

1. Run mbralign on ESXi host for every single *-flat.vmdk file

/opt/ontap/mbralign /vmfs/volumes/bb3e683b-12fad1ea/virthost/virthost-flat.vmdk

2. Then boot from DVD into single user mode and update/reinstall GRUB.

echo | format

bootadm update-archive -f -R /a

installgrub -fm /boot/grub/stage1 /boot/grub/stage2 /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0s0

3. Verify proper booting

4. Remove the vmdk backup files

Bye

Bernd