topic Re: LIF information corrupt in Operating System - HP-UX

LIF information corrupt

Rebecca Hounschell — Fri, 16 Feb 2001 20:22:42 GMT

I am working on an HP9000N with 11.0 loaded. I began to mirror the file systems on the root disk via SAM by selecting the action "MIrror". I get the following error:
lvlnboot: LIF info corrupt or not present on /dev/dsk/...
Use "mkboot" command to initialize the LIF area.
However, /var,/stand, and / are showing 1 mirror and will not let me unmirror them. I get the same error. Can I do the mkboot command at this time and continue or do I have to undo anything that might have been done?

Thanks,
Rebecca

Re: LIF information corrupt

Jitendra_1 — Fri, 16 Feb 2001 21:14:33 GMT

It seems your boot disk is now mirrored but you will not be able to boot from it since the LIF area is corrupt. I am not sure if you can fire mkboot at this point , may be someone else can point that out. But You can use lvcreate -m 0 on this disk to unmirror the disk and then run mkboot.Once that is successful, then re-mirror again.

Hope this helps.

Re: LIF information corrupt

James R. Ferguson — Fri, 16 Feb 2001 21:31:17 GMT

Rebecca:

From document #KBRC00003023.

PROBLEM:

When running: lvlnboot -b

receiving the following error message for none root (VG00) volume groups:

lvlnboot: LIF information corrupt or not present on "/dev/dsk/c?t?d?".
Use the "mkboot" command to initialize the LIF area.
Boot Definitions for Volume Group /dev/VG??:
Physical Volumes belonging in Root Volume Group:

RESOLUTION:

The disks listed in the error message were created as bootable LVM disks:

pvcreate -B (disk)

This reserves an area on the disk for the LIF where the boot information is written. Once this is done, the reserved area must be populated with the boot utilities using the mkboot command.

Since the disks were created with pvcreate -B (disk) instead of pvcreate, they now contain a reserved boot area. The mkboot command was never run which means that the boot utilities were never added to reserved boot area. This can be confirmed by running lifls (disk) on
each disk that lvlnboot -v complains about.

These boot utilities reside at the beginning of the disk, there is no way to remove the reserved space. Therefore, the only way around the error message is to pvcreate the disks again destroying the volume group and recreating the VG from scratch.

This situation leaves two choices:

1) Live with the error when lvlnboot -v is run

2) Recreate the Volume Group in question.

3) Run mkboot against the disks to create a LIF area

...JRF...

Re: LIF information corrupt

Ajitkumar Rane — Sat, 17 Feb 2001 15:54:36 GMT

Rebecca its ok to run a mkboot command at this time.
The thing is that you cannot create a root mirror (bootable) using SAM. You have to use the command line options.Because to start with the first command itself is pvcreate -B (to create a bootable disk) and SAM wont use the option "-B".Do you have the HP's system Admin tasks manual for 10.x ? go to chapter 7.
or take this:

1> pvcreate -B /dev/rdsk/xyz
2> vgextend /dev/vg00 /dev/dsk/xyz
3> mkboot /dev/rdsk/xyz
4> mkboot -a "hpux (;0) /stand/vmunix" /dev/rdsk/xyz
or use
4> mkboot -a "hpux -lq /stand/vmunix" /dev/rdsk/xyz
5> lvextend -m 1 /dev/vg00/lvol1 /dev/dsk/xyz
do this for all the lvols on root disk.
6> lvlnboot -R
7> lvlnboot -v
And check if you see both the disks as boot disk.

Goodluck