Reconfiguration boot in Solaris

Contributed by qmchenry October 3, 2003  
Tagged: Solaris system administration

When adding or removing hardware in a Solaris system, it may be necessary to perform a reconfiguration boot. During this boot, the system discovers new hardware and recreates the file /etc/path_to_inst which contains mappings of physical devices to logical instance numbers.

To perform a reconfiguration boot from a Solaris prompt, create a file called reconfigure in the root filesystem. As root, run:

touch /reconfigure

If you are at the OpenBoot Prompt (ok), you can issue the following command to perform a reconfiguration boot:

boot -r

Warning: Reconfiguration boots can cause problems under certain circumstances, particularly regarding the order of disk devices. Hosts running Solstice DiskSuite should be particularly cautious of reconfiguratio boots that may change the order of disk mappings.