topic Re: Disk Errors in Operating System - OpenVMS

Disk Errors

Robert D Cole — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 12:16:03 GMT

How to I look at the errors on a particular disk?

Re: Disk Errors

Duncan Morris — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 12:28:31 GMT

Hi Robert,

welcome to the itrc openVMS forum!

Please give us some important information to let us help you -

what hardware are you using Vax/Alpha/Integrity ?

what version of VMS are you running?

Duncan

Re: Disk Errors

Robert D Cole — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:23:48 GMT

We are using ALPHAs and version is 7.3

Re: Disk Errors

Hoff — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:15:26 GMT

The four tools involved here (depending on the particular I/O path and OpenVMS versions are:

The add-on tools:

DIAGNOSE (DECevent)

HP SEA / CA / WEBES / WEBEM

These tools are available here:

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/support/svctools/

And the integrated error-related tools:

ANALYZE/ERROR (older versions)

ANALYZE/ERROR/ELV (V7.3-2 and later)

Unfortunately, this area can be somewhat a mixed bag, and you can end up needing two or more of these tools installed, depending on the particular devices and errors involved.

Stephen Hoffman
HoffmanLabs LLC

--

FWIW: If I had a hard disk that was showing errors, I'd be getting the data off the disk and getting set to swap it for a spare. Modern disks tend to have failure modes that make it likely that disks reporting errors are approaching full failure.

It is also my experience that the time and effort and I/O involved in reformatting a disk showing errors -- reformatting is an old solution, and one that hasn't really worked all that well starting with the RA8x series and later -- will probably be wasted.

The I/O involved in off-loading can (also) push the disk into full failure, as can the load of unloading and formatting and reloading.

Disks that are reporting errors should be assumed to be failing, and not really worth the effort to try to "repair".

Re: Disk Errors

atul sardana — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 19:44:24 GMT

Hi Robert,

You can see by the command on the system

$> show device
For example:
$> show device $1$DGA1123:

or simply you can see on all system devices errors by command

$> show error

Please check I hope you got very simple answer.