fsck has reported the I/O error. fsck cannot repair a bad disk. It's sole purpose is to repair bookweeping errors in the filesystem structures. Disks have hundreds of ways to fail, electronic or physical damage. Sometimes they simply stop talking, but not always. And the error LED in front is kust another piece of electronics...sometimes it glows red or yellow and sometimes not. The errors would show in syslog.log but since you cannot bootup, there is no way to look at the logs.
So replace the boot disk. Then if you have only one boot disk, order another disk immediately and if you have the disk mirroring software installed, reinstall the OS from your DVD and immediately mirror the boot disk -- and test the ability to boot from it. Only then should you load all the current patches, then applications and database code.
Finally, Ignite backups are mandatory for production. Whether there is a disk failure in the future or a bad sysadmin error, you need to be able to restore the system quickly. Reinstalling from the DVD means days of downtime. An ignite restore would take just a couple of hours to recover.
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The MP is a separate computer. You connect to the console, type ctrl-B and login to the MP. Once you are logged in, type the SL and E commands to look at the logs. These will be hardware logs and not very easy to understand. But once you read the first log, the amber light will go out. This has no effect on the HP-UX server.
All of your production systems should have remote console connections. This is not HP-UX, it is the hardware console. In the Intel world, this is commonly called the iLO port. If you don't have the remote console LAN connected, you will have to walk into the computer room, locate a terminal, the proper cables and hook up to the serial console port. This can mean multiple hours of delay when you need to use the console.
Bill Hassell, sysadmin
