VAX won't reboot after shadowing system disk

[Mike Goetz]

I'm having an odd problem. I have a VAX 6000-620 system with 4 HSJ40 controlers and a bunch of disks. When I inherited the system, half the disks were offline. I've since brought them back online and set them up for VMS shadowing (host based), and all went as expected until I shadowed the system disk. The system disk shadowing works, and the system will boot fine from the shadowed disk, but it won't REBOOT properly from the shadowed system disk. All the shadowing is local; there's no clustering involved.

When rebooting (via sys$system:shutdown), I get this on the console:

?0002 External halt (CTRL/P, break, or external halt)
PC = 824C5810
PSL = 001F8200
KSP = 7FFE771C

?005B Unknown type of boot device

The boot string is defined as:

DEFAULT /XMI:4 /NODE:00000E0F DU0

CI nodes 14 and 15 are the dual redundant HSJ's on the primary boot disk ($1$DUA0).

If I enter BOOT (with no parameters) at the console, it boots properly. If I turn off the shadowing on the system disk, it reboots properly. But it won't reboot with the system disk shadowed unless I tell it to boot from the console.

This is the backup computer system; the primary system works just fine with everything shadowed. I can't find any meaningful differences between the primary and backup systems.

Here's the relevant details:

VAX/VMS version 5.5-2H4

4 HSJ40 controlers. HSJ001 and HSJ002 are serving DISK100 as D0 as $1$DUA0: and HSJ003 and HSJ004 are serving their DISK100 as D0 as $2$DUA0:.

DSA1 (the system disk) consists of $1$DUA0: and $2$DUA0:.

HSJ001 and HSJ002 are running firmware version 37J whereas HSJ003 and HSJ004 are running 32J. (On the primary system, all four HSJ's are running 32J).

In VMS, the relevent SYSGEN parameters are set thussly:

SHADOWING 2
SHADOW_SYS_DISK 1
SHADOW_SYS_UNIT 0
SHADOW_MAX_COPY 4
SHADOW_MBR_TMO 20

Any ideas why the system won't do a clean reboot now?

[Robert Brooks_1]

DSA1 (the system disk) consists of $1$DUA0: and $2$DUA0:.

In VMS, the relevent SYSGEN parameters are set thussly:

SHADOWING 2
SHADOW_SYS_DISK 1
SHADOW_SYS_UNIT 0
SHADOW_MAX_COPY 4
SHADOW_MBR_TMO 20

---

You claim that the system disk is DSA1, yet your SYSGEN params (SHADOW_SYS_UNIT) show that it is DSA0

[Mike Goetz]

Oops. Bad cut and paste there. SHADOW_SYS_UNIT is actually 1.

[Martin Hughes · Accepted solution]

I think that you need to define boot specification strings for each disk that you want the system to attempt to boot.

For Example;

>>> SET BOOT $$00 /XMI:4 /NODE:00000E0F DU0

You should see;

>>> SHOW BOOT
DEFAULT /XMI:4 /NODE:00000E0F DU0
$$00 /XMI:4 /NODE:00000E0F DU0

[Mike Goetz]

Thanks for that suggestion; I'll give it a try a little later today.

I thought the boot strings, other than 'DEFAULT', were simply a shorthand for convienence's sake. I didn't realize they affected the system.

[Mike Goetz]

Thanks, that did it. It's rebooting correctly now.