D380 : Drive is not responding

Jerry Gamblin — Sat, 14 Aug 2004 20:45:11 GMT

I have been put in charge of our HP9000 D380 until we hire a new HPUXAdmin and today I am having my first hardware problem.

Last night EMS sent me this email:

/storage/events/disks/default/8_4.10.0 is >= 3.
Its current value is CRITICAL(5).

Event data from monitor:

Event Time..........: Sat Aug 14 16:35:55 2004
Severity............: CRITICAL
Monitor.............: disk_em
Event #.............: 3
System..............: hp9000

Summary:
Disk at hardware path 8/4.10.0 : Drive is not responding.

So I got up this morning and like any good admin spent my Saturday in the office. I called HP and they said that the drive was bad and need to be replaced.

Not a bad idea, but I didnâ t want to have to replace a drive on a system I am not 100% sure how its set up. So while I was waiting for the CE to call and schedule a drive replacement and our campus solutions people to tell me how to restore the Informix database I go and reseed the drive to see if it would do anything.

Bingo! Drives resync and everything is running!

Ioscan â nfC disk shows 8/4.10.0 is reclaimed and the Informix database is running just fine now.

It runs for 13 hours and it sends another alert.

Repeat the reseeding adventure and its up and working again, we will see for how long.

Do you guys believe this is actually a drive problem, since it works for 12 hours just fine then stops responding?

I have one open spot on the drive plane; will it change the physical address if next time it stops responding I plug it into the empty s

Re: D380 : Drive is not responding

Patrick Wallek — Sat, 14 Aug 2004 23:09:30 GMT

Yes it is entirely possible, and highly probably, that the drive is going bad. I had that happen on a drive on one of my machines last week, but it only took a couple of hours for the drive to fail the next time.

You do not want to plug the drive into a different slot. That WILL change the drive's SCSI address, which would not be a good thing.

Your best bet is to schedule some down time, make sure you have a full backup of the system and data on that drive and get the drive replaced.

Now the thing you need to check is whether or not that drive has logical volumes that are part of a mirror set. This can be done with the lvdisplay command ('man lvdisplay' for more info.). If all the LVs on that drive are mirrored, then replacing that drive will be a fairly simple process. If the LVs on that drive are not mirrored, then the process will be more complicated.

If you can access it, have a read through 'Chapter 16 - Logical Volume Manager' of the Software Recovery Handbook. It has details on how to replace drives in all kinds of different situations.

Software Recovery Handbook -
http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/iv/node.do?node=prodITRC%2FWW_Start%2FN1%7C16

Chapter 16 - Logical Volume Manager (LVM) -
http://www1.itrc.hp.com/service/iv/node.do?node=prodITRC%2FWW_Start%2FN1%7C16%7C11

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D380 : Drive is not responding

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