Solaris won't boot from CD or disk with the following error messages:

cat: Cannot stat stdout

adb: getexecname() failed

/sbin/rcS: /etc/vfstab: cannot create

These messages are described in bugid 4155476. What's really going on here is that your SC has an invalid date set on it in the domain shell for the domain that you're trying to boot. Solaris is picking up this invalid date and trying to run with it. The messages above are a direct result of Solaris being unable to mount the /proc filesystem because of the invalid date. The first thing to do here is to go to the domain shell and set the date correctly. The second thing to do is to use a version of Solaris later than Solaris 8 01/01, the key being that you need at least the -07 rev of kernel patch 108528 which fixes bug 4381821. With -07 and greater, Solaris will detect that there is an invalid date and show the following, more informative, error messages instead:

WARNING: todsg: Date overflow detected. Correct the date.

WARNING: Time-of-day chip had incorrect date; check and reset.

Solaris will then ignore the tod chip's setting and set the time and date to that of when it was last shut down.

Authors:John Cecere