Unable to boot alternate disk

[Norville Cole]

Hi,
I get the following error IPL error: Bad lif magic, error reading ipl. Does anybody know what the fix is for this?

Norville Cole

[Torsten.]

Looks like a bad configuration or even a bad disk.
If you still can boot the primary disk, boot from there and check your disk and mirror config (lvlnboot -v, lifls ...).

[TwoProc · Accepted solution]

It's possible that all of the lvms are mirrored, but that alternate boot disk was never fully made bootable.

mkboot -b
had to have been run

mkboot -a
had to have been run

and the startup string would have to have been set to not check for quorum

And, the lvlnboot command would have to be run over all of the areas to set the flags for booting, swapping, etc.

If one of these commands is skipped, you can end up not being able to boot from the alternate boot path.

At this point, like the previous poster has said, you need to come up on your primary, and start looking at all of the steps, and see if anything is missing, start with lvlnboot -v, and also use the "lifls" command to see if you've got an LIF space and if there is anything in it. You can use lifcp to copy the AUTO file to a local file system to see if you've got a valid hpux startup command line with quorum checking turned off.

My guess, from the error you've gotten, is that the LIF area either doesn't exist or doesn't have files in it.

If you can't boot from the original disk, then hopefully you've got an ignite backup you can recover from.

[Norville Cole]

I was able to boot the system but I kept getting error message about a disk that was no longer accessable. I was able to get rid of the errors messages by doing the following
thank all that responded. Norville

Resolution: booted into single user mode
vgchange -a y -q n /dev/vg00
lvreduce /dev/vg00/lvol1
lvreduce /dev/vg00/lvol2 this would not let you because it is the swap partition
lvreduce /dev/vg00/lvol3
came up with a bunch of errors and vgscan does not work due to a memory fault coredump
rebooted system in normal mode
copied lvmtab file from a rebuilt system
reboot system and now we are good to go





I was able to get the disk to boot by going into single user mode and giving the command vgchange -a y -q n /dev/dsk/c0t6d0. Now I have another problem while booting up it complain about not being able to see the mirror disk that I had removed /dev/dsk/c0t5d0. I have tried vgreduce and it worked fine but when I went to rebuilt the lvmtab file with vgscan it coredump on me
Memory Fault:coredump

Mirror disk failure on system[amchitka]. Found lvdisplay: Warning: couldn't query physical volume "/dev/dsk/c0t5d0": stale condition(s)

[Torsten.]

To copy the lvmtab from another system will likely not solve a problem, it will at least add a problem.

Not sure what of the above is history and what is current.

Can you boot to run level 3 now?

If, please provide this:

vgdisplay -v vg00
ioscan -fn
strings /etc/lvmtab

[Norville Cole]

the system I copied the lvmtab file from was the same system rebuilt with ignite. I am good to go at this point. The main problem I was running into was when I went to rebuild the lvmtab file I would get a memory fault error. I have other systems that have mirror disk and one of them is experiencing the same problem but I am unable to repeat the same process due to logistics.

[Mridul Shrivastava]

you said "Now I have another problem while booting up it complain about not being able to see the mirror disk that I had removed /dev/dsk/c0t5d0."

Firt thing do u have this system's lvmtab file backup ?? then copy it as copying lvmtab from other system won't help since it contains VGID,PVID etc which is different on the systems. I can not be identical even if setup/configuration is same.

Second thing. Please let us know the whats the current problem is ??
a) system is not booting with alternate disk ? but u said that u have removed the mirrored disk?

b) lvmtab is not populated properly ?

Please explain from the begining as how the problem started and then current status.