Recently I got a Sun Ultra 20 workstation with Solaris 10 preinstalled. Everything was fine and I was using Java Desktop Environment. Sun Update Manager (SUM) showed the list of available patches and I installed some of them including a kernel patch, 118844-30 using SUM. It showed that some of the matches required restart. So I did "shutdown -i 6" and things worked. Few days later I again started SUM and installed some of the patches including another kernel patch, (perhaps) 118855-19. Again SUM showed that for some of the patches restart is required. Again I did "shutdown -i 6". Now the machine keeps on rebooting and rebooting and rebooting...

I see two options "Solaris 10 1/06 s10x_u1wos_19a X86" and "solaris failsafe". When I select the first one, I see a message like:

SunOS Release 5.10 Version Generic_118855-19 64-bit
Copyright...
Use is subject to licence terms

WARNING: Last shutdown is later that time on time-of-day chip; check date

Then follow some other messages which do not stay for long on screen. The last lines are something like:

fffffffbc45940 Unix:_start+95 ()

Syncing file systems... done

And the machine reboots, repeating the samething and this process continues. The other lines which are flashed quickly on the screen also start with fffff.. and have () in the end.

Selecing "Solaris failsage" I can enter. I search for some log files but nothing apparently useful is found.

I am in great trouble. I have some important data on the hard drive which I may be lost if I start with fresh Solaris installation. Please help.

You can boot in single user mode, and backout the patch, if you didn't install with disabling backuout.

How can I backout a patch? How to check if backout was disabled or not? All I did was just clicking on the "Install items" button in Sun Update Manager after selecting some patches from the list of available patches.

patchrm allows you to backout a patch.

Unfortunately, I just read that this specific patch isn't "backoutable", as it modifies data outside the file-system by introducing grub.

This patch has specific requirements, especially it asked you to reconfigure immediatly at next reboot (boot -r). Did you do that ?

About the important data on your hard-drive, you can still recover them by booting in failsafe mode.

Finally, you can boot with the "-m verbose -kd" options to figure out where the kernel panic happen.

See http://blogs.sun.com/dmick/date/20050615