topic Re: Recover from failed disk in Operating System - HP-UX

Recover from failed disk

Richard Lathom — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 18:34:48 GMT

I have been asked to help someone recover from a failed disk on an HPUX11i v1 system. The disk is one of three(3) in a non-mirrored volume group with one(1) logical volume. There is no .conf config file available. The contents can be restored from tape. All that needs done is restoring the volume group, logical volume and a blank filesystem. The disk has been replaced and shows in an ioscan with the same name as before. The steps I've worked out are:

1) vgreduce -l /dev/
2) mv /etc/lvmtab /etc/lvmtab.old
3) rm /etc/lvmtab
4) vgscan -v
5) vgcfgbackup /dev/
6) vgcfgrestore -n /dev/ /dev/rdsk/
7) mkfs -F vxfs /dev//
8) mount /dev//
9) restore from tape

Does that cover everything or am I missing something?

Re: Recover from failed disk

Pete Randall — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 18:55:51 GMT

Richard,

This document should guide you:

http://www.docs.hp.com/en/5991-1236/When_Good_Disks_Go_Bad_WP.pdf

Pete

Re: Recover from failed disk

Richard Lathom — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 19:03:06 GMT

Thank you. That's the document I used to come up with this plan. I was just looking for confirmation that I hadn't overlooked anything.

Re: Recover from failed disk

James R. Ferguson — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 19:28:18 GMT

Hi:

Step-3 is superflous. You remaned the 'lvmtab' in step-2 thus removing it :-)

That aside, you indicated that you don't have a 'vgNN.conf' file to use with 'vgcfgrestore, Hence I would simply create your volume group and logical volume from scratch:

# vgchange -a n /dev/vgNN
# vgexport /dev/vgNN
# pvcreate ...
# mkdir /dev/vgNN
# mknod /dev/vgNN/group c 64 0xNN0000
# vgcreate ...
# lvcreate ...
# newfs ...
# mount ...
# [ restore data ]

Regards!

...JRF...
Regards!

...JRF...

Re: Recover from failed disk

Richard Lathom — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 19:55:12 GMT

Thank you very much JRF. You are quite right that it would be simpler to recreate everything from scratch. I was approaching it the other way because that was, as I read it, the way to go according to the HP document "When_Good_Disks_Go_Bad".

Re: Recover from failed disk

Richard Lathom — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:21:40 GMT

I used JRF's suggestion to start from scratch. The only glitch I ran into was not realizing at first that I had to use the -f (force) option with pvcreate on the two disks that the system still knew were assigned to the volume group I had just exported in the previous step. Once I fixed that everything went smoothly and all is well. My thanks again to JRF.

Re: Recover from failed disk

Richard Lathom — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:25:36 GMT

Thread closed. As noted above I was satisfied with the results of JRF's suggested plan.