Somehow I screwed up my F760 so it wouldn't boot to the "CTRL+C"
maintenance menu. I think I overwrote the boot images on the filers
/etc/boot directory with some bad files, then it wouldn't boot anymore.
Everyone I talked to said "use the floppies to boot". But I didn't have
any floppies and no support contract with NetApp (may they win against
Sun).
So had a problem where I had the Data ONTAP images but no floppy disks.
I had the 10mb boot file "netapp_6.5.7-alpha" in the /etc/boot directory
of the ONTAP image but no way to get the filer to boot to it. I tried
desperately for 4 days to find the image online or via my circle of
geeky friends to no avail. So I delved into the firmware prompt (the
OK> prompt), I think it's the firmware, correct me if I'm wrong. And
found that I could boot from a bootp DHCP server by using the "boot net"
command, for anyone who doesn't know you can get into this prompt by
hitting CTRL+C right before it says 'finding image....' For those who
are suffering from the 'Can't open boot device' error that's the only
CTRL+C menu you're going to get to. Also all of this work is done via
the console.
I quickly setup a bootp server on my win2k3 box long with solarwinds
TFTP server. Added the entries 'boot server host
name:myservershostname' and 'bootfile name:netapp_6.5.7-alpha',
configured the address pool I setup to allow both DHCP and BOOTP
clients, then went into advanced on the DHCP's servers properties,
exposed the bootp table, added my image file and path locally on the
server as well as my TFPT address (same as the DHCP's address) and the
damn thing booted right up! I could even watch the progress as it
downloaded the file from the TFPT server. I used the CTRL+C menu (the
proper one this time) to initialize all disk and off I'm going!
Now I know all you veteran toaster admins are going "Well duh!". But
you must understand that I have no education on NetApp's firmware or the
Data ONTAP OS, and this is the first filer I've ever seen. This is pure
experimentation on my part. There are others who have the same exact
problem, and this IS a solution. You don't NEED floppies even if you
totally destroy the software on the filer. Hope this helps someone who
has the same issue as I did.
-Tony