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