topic Re: Identify Drives in Operating System - HP-UX

Identify Drives

Marc Berman — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 14:34:14 GMT

Hello,
Our J5600 crashed and the boot drive didn't start up on restart. Well the user thought they would try the drive in another slot. He didn't note the drive locations when he pulled the 3 other "good" drives.
Our problem is this - We got the boot drive running but we not sure which slot the other three drives go. All of them use logical volumes. Is there an easy way to find out which one goes where? We don't want to loose the data/configurations.

Re: Identify Drives

Marc Berman — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 14:54:51 GMT

I forgat to note that we are running 11.11

Re: Identify Drives

spex — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 15:11:38 GMT

Marc,

Are all of the drives the same model? Did you happen to capture 'ioscan' output from before the drives were pulled to a file?

PCS

Re: Identify Drives

Marc Berman — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 15:32:22 GMT

Yes they are all the same model

Re: Identify Drives

Marc Berman — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 15:33:45 GMT

No we don't have an ioscan

Re: Identify Drives

Marc Berman — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 17:39:24 GMT

Here's a question what happens to the LVM's and data if we boot the systems and the drives are incorrectly placed?

Re: Identify Drives

Sandman! — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 18:30:58 GMT

>Here's a question what happens to the LVM's and data if we boot the systems and the drives are incorrectly placed?

Maybe LVM won't recognize the PVs as belonging to the VG since the H/W paths will be different and so will the device file names. Worst case is data loss and corruption. Your best bet is to leave it to the experts by opening a support call with HP.

Re: Identify Drives

Michal Toth — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 07:44:39 GMT

you should not lose any data on those disk, but most likely you won't be able to boot since the paths are different now and if all those disks belong to vg00, then it won't get activated during the boot process..

your options here:
- boot into lvm maintenance (and fix lvm if succesful)
- boot off ignite tape or installation media and start recovery shell, fix lvm from recovery shell

Re: Identify Drives

Marc Berman — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 12:22:08 GMT

The boot drive contains vg00 and that one is the only one running now. It's the other 3 drives that we are unsure of. My thinking was that if all we get is errors I would just keep trying until they were correctly placed.

Re: Identify Drives

OldSchool — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 11:00:04 GMT

Marc,

Well...there are a grand total of six combinations of the three disks in question, so the number isn't insurmountable. As to whether or not the data will get scrambled, I don't know.

I *think* I'd talk to the HP storage support.

Good luck, hope you get this sorted out

Re: Identify Drives

Marc Berman — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 10:49:48 GMT

Thanks for everyone's comments. I positioned the drives in the order I thought they should be, used vgscan and restarted. Everything is back to normal.