Troubleshooting flash archive installation fail scenarios when extracting an archive (Doc ID 1005249.1)

Last updated on JUNE 13, 2023

Applies to:

Purpose

On some occasions, users find that Solaris flash archive installation fails with the following error messages printed on screen:

ERROR: Could not stop the extraction

ERROR: Could not extract Flash archive

ERROR: Flash installation failed

The above messages are far from helpful. It becomes more confusing when many completely different conditions could lead to these errors. This document attempts to organize a list of common root causes. It might grow in the future with newly found members.

The above messages can be a manifestation of the following problems:

1. cpio archives can contain hard links. Due to the fact that clone filesystem layouts may differ from the layout on the Flash Archive Primary system, these hard links may end up spanning filesystems on the clone. cpio will complain about this, but Sun flash archives will not notice such anomalies.
2. The Solaris flash archive and the Solaris JumpStart profile contain the same NFS mount point. To verify:
   1. cat profile
   2. search for NFS file system from the profile
   3. flar info -l | grep
3. With Solaris Operating System 10 for x86 Platforms, hardware-optimized libc.so.1 is lofs-mounted over /lib/libc.so.1. The Solaris flash archive creation process is picking up the hardware-optimized libc.so.1 that is lofs-mounted over /lib/libc.so.1. To verify, check if the Flash Archive Primary system has the libc lofs mount point.
4. If /etc/mnttab is excluded, the Solaris Flash archive deployment will not work. To verify, check how the Solaris flash archive is created.
5. Some system slice of the clone machine is short of space. To verify, check the size of the archive and the size of the clone partitions, also do a "df -k" to verify if any system slice is almost 100% full.

Troubleshooting Steps