How to reset a Mounted wrtlck Disk

[Doug Vegge]

We have a DEC Alpha 4100 that what rebooted during a backup. One of the disk drives in now display a status of Mounted WrtLck. How do I reset this?

[Thomas Ritter]

Doug, need a bit more information.
Is this a shadow set and what are the command for mounting it ?
Provide a point form summary of how the disk got into this state. Show the output form the
$ sho dev ??? /full

[Doug Vegge]

Not a shadow set. the mount comand used was mount/system/noassist/rebuild dkc201:

[Doug Vegge]

The backup job was in a hung state as the job normally requires two (2) DLT4 tapes. There were no tape related messages to the operator console, job does a reply/enable=(tapes). The SLS$ queue was reset which aborted the backup job. A "show dev d" provided a disk listing that showed over 61,000 errors for disk dkc201. I expected to find a failed hard disk. Unfortunately my DECEvents license expired on 11/30/2005, and my request to HP on 11/15 received no response. A directory of this disk did not produce a listing. The system was rebooted to clear the 61,000 errors

SFIS6:: > show dev /full dkc201

Disk SFIS6$DKC201:, device type HSZ50-AX, is online, mounted, software write-
locked, file-oriented device, shareable, available to cluster, error logging
is enabled.

Error count 1 Operations completed 383866
Owner process "" Owner UIC [SYSTEM]
Owner process ID 00000000 Dev Prot S:RWPL,O:RWPL,G:R,W
Reference count 1 Default buffer size 512
Total blocks 35556389 Sectors per track 254
Total cylinders 7000 Tracks per cylinder 20

Volume label "BILDATA$DISK" Relative volume number 0
Cluster size 35 Transaction count 1
Free blocks 5393885 Maximum files allowed 493838
Extend quantity 5 Mount count 1
Mount status System Cache name "_SFIS6$DKD100:XQPCACHE"
Extent cache size 64 Maximum blocks in extent cache 539388
File ID cache size 64 Blocks in extent cache 0
Quota cache size 0 Maximum buffers in FCP cache 3494
Volume owner UIC [SYSTEM] Vol Prot S:RWCD,O:RWCD,G:RWCD,W:RWCD

Volume Status: ODS-2, subject to mount verification, file high-water marking,
write-back caching enabled.

SFIS6:

[Thomas Ritter]

Doug, the disk maybe at end of life. Check to see if an error LED is lit. Is it possible to reboot and not mount the disk ? If so, then try to mount it locally and run some anal/disk commands.

[Volker Halle]

Doug,

you do not need a DECevent license to translate ERRLOG.SYS and find the disk errors, but you might not want to do this for all of the 61000 errors...

If there are disk-errors on certain parts of the internal files of the file system, MOUNT may actually mount the disk write-locked to prevent further writes to that disk, but allow you to recover important files.

If you can, look at the MOUNT error message during your last startup. Otherwise try to dismount the disk and mount it again. Maybe consider to try to back up the important files first !

Volker.

[Art Wiens]

I recently had a Seagate go south on me. VMS wouldn't / couldn't mount it complaining it didn't have access to SECURITY.SYS file. I was able to mount it /NOWRITE and copied some files off it before it kacked alltogether.

As suggested, more than likely there is damage to the file system (root cause probably being damage to the drive). Get whatever files you can and replace the drive.

Good Luck,
Art

ps. I found that using COPY rather than BACKUP was the only way to get files off. Using BACKUP seemed to hang the SCSI bus (VAXstation 4000, VMS v6.2, single SCSI, 3 - 4GB drives) ... the drive was really "broken"!

[Doug Vegge]

Drive was failing.