Bring Alpha 4100 back online following a manual reboot (OVMS 7.3-2)

[Neal Kirby]

ITRC Community

Due to system disk space errors - services, queues & processes began to shut down on our Alpha 4100 (OVMS 7.3-2).

Someone tried to transfer a file from one Alpha to another but it failed. A traceruote proved that the connection was open. (1 hop away). They had the bright idea to restart tcpware. They got as far as stopping tcpware but it did not restart.

Next they did a manual reboot of the system (to restart tcpware). When this completed we were stuck in a loop - asking us to delete 13000 blocks to make room for our queue manager to run... (Fair enough)

Breaking out of this loop we get a PC00>>> prompt. I am aware of the Help - but it is not very helpful.

1. Can someone tell us where we are? and
2. how we can bring the system back on line?

Don't worry - this is a test system and not a mission critical box. We still need it for testing though.

Thanks in Advance.

Neal

[Heinz W Genhart · Accepted solution]

Hi Neal

You can boot the System from CD or you can do a conversational boot.

CD Boot
-------

Enter a OpenVMS Distribution CD into your cd drive. Then boot this cd with

b 'cd-drive'

After the cd is booted, a menu is displayed and you can select (not sure) point 7 or 8 (Execute a DCL Command)

Then you can mount the systmemdisk and do a purge.

$ mount 'system-disk-name'/over=ide

If the disk is a member of a shadowset then

$ mount/over=(shad,ide) 'system-disk-name'
$ purge /keep=n 'system-disk-name':[000000...]


Conversational boot
-------------------
In console mode of the 4100 do

SHOW BOOT_OSFLAGS

Boot_osflags is a variable containing something like x,y

x stands for the root to boot (0 = sys0, 1=sys1 ...)
y is mostly 0 (a normal boot) or 1 (a conversational boot)

To do conversational boot you use the following command

B -fl x,1 (substitute x with your root number)

The machine will start booting an soon you will see the SYSBOOT> prompt.

SYSBOOT> set startup_P1 "MIN"
SYSBOOT> c(ontinue)

The System will do a minimal startup. SYSTARTUIP_VMS will not be executed.

You should then be able to login and to purge the systemdisk.
If successfull and you plan to reboot the machine for normal operation, you must first change startup_p1 to ""

To do that, you can do another conversation boot and reset this parameter in SYSBOOT, or you can do the following

$ MC SYSGEN
SYSGEN> use current
SYSGEN> set startup_P1 ""
SYSGEN> write current

and then do the reboot.
Or you can also simply execute autogen and reboot

I hope that helps a litle bit

Regards

Heinz

[Jan van den Ende]

Neal,

time for conversational boot.

Just to make sure, start with
PC>> show boot_osflags.

(I expect 0,0 , but ...)

Now, repace that second zero with 1 (but use whatever the first is)

PC>> boot -flag 0,1 << remember, the 0 is whatever the show gave you)

system should get into

SYSBOOT>

enter

set startup_p1 = "MIN"

enter

c

now you are in minimal config

Was the failed tranfer a rather big one? Then it might well have helped you over the fatality threshold.
If you know the target file, DELETE that one.
It may already be enough.
Otherwise, try the cleanup I supplied in your other stream.

If this gives enough room, then shutdown.
Reboot with the second flag 0.

Success!

Proost.

Have one on me.

jpe

[Neal Kirby]

First Off -

The system is back online & working perfectly. (We will need to address the space requirement going forward).

Reply -

Heinz - An almost perfect procedure to resolve the issue completely! (I feel guilty just awarding 10 points).

JPE - similar procedure but... the extra points are awarded for the added purge information as supplied in a previous stream.

Combining both inputs and the solution was spot on!

Well done to all and thanks again!

Neal