[OmniOS-discuss] Unable to boot r151014 USB installation media; difference between ISO and USB files?

[Marcus Marinelli]

Hi All,

I'm hoping to be able to use OmniOS in a hosted/cloud environment, but
having some problems getting a working image setup.

I began by trying to install the latest stable (r151014) by writing the USB
disk installation file (OmniOS_Text_r151014.usb-dd) to a virtual device on
the VM provider, adding a blank disk to install to, and booting the
virtualized KVM node against the usb image.

The VM comes up and shows the OmniOS grub splash screen, lets me choose the
regular or ttya/ttyb boot menu selections, however after getting the
initial "SunOS Release 5.11 Version omnios-f090f73 64-bit" messages to show
up, things start going poorly.

After "Preparing image for use" is shown, next I see:

Requesting System Maintenance Mode
(See /lib/svc/share/README for more information.)
Console login service(s) cannot run

Enter use name for system maintenance (control-d to bypass):

At this point, once I drop into the shell, svcs -vx shows

svc:/system/filesystem/root-assembly:media (Installation file system
assembly) is in state maintenance due to reason "Start method exited with
$SMF_EXIT_ERR_FATAL" and consequently a whole bunch (55) of dependent
services are not running.

If I look at the svc log for system-filesystem-root-assembly:media, I see:

Executing start method ("/lib/svc/method/media-assembly")
Unable to mount media

Looking in /lib/svc/method/media-assembly, I believe it is failing quite
early:

. /lib/svc/share/media_include.sh
. /lib/svc/share/smf_include.sh
. /lib/svc/share/fs_include.sh

volsetid=$( < "/.volsetid" )

echo "\rPreparing image for use" >/dev/msglog

/usr/sbin/mount_media $volsetid
if [ $? -ne 0]; then
echo "Unable to mount media"
echo $SMF_EXIT_ERR_FATAL
fi

For reference, the contents of /.volsetid ($volsetid) is
"r151014-2015-09-30T13:22:46.571554"

If I run the /lib/svc/method/media-assembly script at this point (from the
shell) I can see that /usr/sbin/mount_media is returning exit code 1, which
explains why the script is failing and consequently SMF has given up.

In order to diagnose this further, I then took the same USB image
(OmniOS_Text_r151014.usb-dd) and wrote it to a real physical USB disk, and
booted a real physical machine from it. The machine is 2 or 3 years old at
this point - not brand new, but not ancient either. The surprising thing is
I experienced the same behavior - the "real" machine failed to boot in the
same way with seemingly the same issue.

At this point, I thought maybe something was wrong with the r151014 USB
installation media, so I downloaded r151012, r151010, r151006 and r151004's
USB installation files. Flashed them all (in sequence, working backwards)
to a real USB stick and experienced the same problem on all of them.

I then took the r151014 ISO image file, burned that to a disk, and put it
in the same physical computer, and it booted right up and loaded the OmniOS
installer fine.

It looks like this may be related to another user's recent experience:

http://lists.omniti.com/pipermail/omnios-discuss/2015-September/005651.html

(at least it sure seems like the same failure mode, although it's not clear
from that email chain if the user installed r151012 successfully from the
.usb-dd image or if they, perhaps, also used an ISO image for the
successful '012 installation they mentioned)

Can anyone (Dan? :)) help shed some light on what I might be doing wrong
here with the USB installation media?

Thanks,
Marcus
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