I had a situation today with a Dell PowerEdge 1750 where my attempt to load Solaris 10 06/06 on it failed miserably. Using Jumpstart, I attempted to install the box per the normal routine but this one server kept panicing in the cadp160 driver. This driver is for the Adaptec 39160 HBA PCI card that is on this system to connect it to a Dell PowerVault. This driver reliably crashed in cadp160:SCSIInitialize() at every boot attempt.
Since the system disk on this PE1750 was off the on-board LSI Fusion MPT controller, I figured I should just get the box built first and figure out the problems with the Adaptec driver later. But how do I tell the Solaris kernel to not load the Adaptec driver to avoid the inevitable panic? I just can’t edit /etc/system in this netboot case. A bit of searching and asking on #opensolaris revealed a not-too-well documented kernel argument:-B disable-[driver name]=true
So in this case I editted the GRUB boot loader and added disable-cadp160=true to the list of arguments supplied to kernel/unix. Boom. The kernel displayed a message alerting me to the fact that cadp160 wasn’t being loaded and went on its merry way to a full boot and install.
[tags]solaris, opensolaris[/tags]