Bad PBR Sig

I’ve been installing some Sun Blade systems (x6270 and x6250) and after the install of Solaris, on reboot it hangs with the error ‘Bad PBR Sig’.

This error indicated that a valid boot record isn’t being found on the first boot device.

Causes for this could be:-

– Incorrect primary boot device selection in the BIOS

– Corrupted boot record on the disk. To resolve this you need to use the grubinstall command.

In my case, it was the first issue, so I resolved this by going into BIOS and changing the order of the boot devices. I don’t know why but I find doing this difficult every time as I seem to mis-understand the instructions in the interface.

Steps to change the BIOS boot order

1. On system reboot, press F2 to ask for the setup screen later in the boot process

2. In setup screen navigate using your arrow keys to the ‘Boot’ tab

3. Use your down arrow to select ‘Boot device priority’  and use ‘Enter’ to select.

4. On the list number 1, press enter to bring up a dialog box. Use your arrow key to move over the device you want as your primary boot device, and press ‘Enter’ to select.

5. F10 to save and exit (if you’re connecting through ILOM, you need to use the F10 menu option under the Keyboard menu.