Booting USB fails - KLD opensolaris.ko depends on kernel

[caldwell]

Trying to work on a SuperMicro box with existing 2 year old 8.3 installation. Didn't want to simply upgrade because we've never done that before and didn't want to find out the hard way that, "Oops. You can't upgrade XYZ without some kind of weird failure."

So, we opted to take the latest CURRENT image and put it on an USB stick and boot from there. (The person who set it up had installed onto a local disk. We are attempting to boot new, test and then see if we can either run from USB or upgrade in place on the existing drive.)

After booting and going into the web interface, we could import the old config that we had saved on a laptop. The system read the 8.3 config and rebooted.

Now, we get this:

kldload opensolaris
KLD opensolaris.ko: depends on kernel - not available or version mismatch
linker_load_file: unsupported file type
kldload: can't load opensolaris: Exec format error

KLD zfs.ko: depends on opensolaris - not available or version mismatch
linker_load_file: unsupported file type

Not many results for that error in Google. Some mention recompiling kernels. Not an option here.

Any ideas on how to move beyond this?

The .ko files have a Dec 12 2012 timestamp on them. So I'm presuming that this is the proper timestamp for each of the "latest" files for this release.

 

[cyberjock]

That sounds like something wasn't done right on the imaging. Maybe the device is bad?

To be honest, I'd have opted for upgrades over full installs. The most reliable and troublefree way to do this would be:

1. Get a new USB stick (name brand, 4GB+, etc.). Do an install of 8.3.1. Import you config file and make sure everything works.
2. Do an ISO upgrade from 8.3.1 to 9.1.1. (alternately you can do a GUI upgrade which should be fine too)
3. Do an ISO upgrade from 9.1.1 to 9.2.0. (alternately you can do a GUI upgrade which should be fine too)
4. Do an ISO upgrade from 9.2.0 to 9.2.1.9 (alternately you can do a GUI upgrade which should be fine too)

ISO upgrades are the upgrade that is "hitting it with a hammer". It's virtually guaranteed to give you a working upgrade. GUI upgrades are a little more fragile. Don't get me wrong, GUI upgrades are very safe. But if you want to be paranoid CD-ROM upgrades are the way to go.

Keep in mind that after an upgrade the system will have to do two reboots before all is fully upgraded. Once done you should check to make sure everything works and save the config file again since it's compatible with a newer version.