Old HP 9000/785 Workstation

[ronlevyca]

I have an old HP 9000/785 Workstation running 11.11. It has two drives - an 18gb boot drive and a 73 gb auxiliary drive where it (used to) run Oracle Grid Control.

I receive a complaint that it can't reach the 73GB drive and the machine is locked up and uncontactable. So we reboot and it hangs on reboot trying to find the 73GB drive. So we reboot again, go to single-user, and take the mounting of that 73GB drive out of the fstab so it will come up.

The ioscan -funC disk gives:
disk 1 10/0/15/0.5.0 sdisk CLAIMED DEVICE HP 73.4GST373453LC
/dev/dsk/c2t5d0 /dev/rdsk/c2t5d0
disk 2 10/0/15/0.6.0 sdisk CLAIMED DEVICE FUJITSU MAJ3182MC
/dev/dsk/c2t6d0 /dev/rdsk/c2t6d0

But when you try to vgchange -a y vg01 which resides on /dev/dsk/c2t5d0, it fails with:

vgchange: Warning: Couldn't attach to the volume group physical volume "/dev/dsk/c2t5d0":
I/O error
vgchange: Warning: couldn't query physical volume "/dev/dsk/c2t5d0":
The specified path does not correspond to physical volume attached to
this volume group
vgchange: Warning: couldn't query all of the physical volumes.
vgchange: Couldn't activate volume group "vg01":
Quorum not present, or some physical volume(s) are missing.

When I use 'SAM' it claims that that disk is 'unclaimed'. When I use strings /dev/rdsk/c2t5d0, it hangs a while, and then just spits back a prompt.

is there any way to contact that drive again without having to wipe it and recover files? Which are old because this machine isn't quite crucial enough for regular backups?

[Mark McDonald_2]

Sounds like a failed disk drive. When is your last backup from?

[ronlevyca]

If the drive is failed, how come ioscan calls it 'CLAIMED'? Wouldn't it be 'NO_HW'?

And fortunately, the backup is about 2 weeks ago and will likely serve well when we get to that point - it's an application, not regularly updated data.

[Matti_Kurkela · Accepted solution]

NO_HW happens only when the device won't answer at all to the system's inquiries.

Often, but not always, the disk will stop communicating with the rest of the system if its internal power-on diagnostic detects a failure.

Run "diskinfo -v /dev/rdsk/c2t5d0". Some disks will report their size as 0 if they have failed.

HP-UX stores the device identification string and can display it even after the device has gone to the NO_HW state, but other systems may not do that. In such systems, the behavior "if failed, report zero size" may be preferred over "if failed, pretend you don't exist" because the first behavior may still allow reading the device's type and serial number remotely. If the system is in a remote location, this allows the maintenance person to get a correct spare part in advance, so only one visit to the location is required.

MK

[ronlevyca]

I get:

#diskinfo -v /dev/rdsk/c2t5d0
SCSI describe of /dev/rdsk/c2t5d0:
vendor: HP 73.4G
product id: ST373453LC
type: direct access
size: 0 Kbytes
bytes per sector: 0
rev level: HPC4
blocks per disk: 0
ISO version: 0
ECMA version: 0
ANSI version: 3
removable media: no
response format: 2
(Additional inquiry bytes: (32)48 (33)57 (34)30 (35)45 (36)53 (37)51 (38)37 (39)20 (40)20 (41)20 (42)20 (43)53 (44)45 (45)41 (46)47 (47)41 (48)54 (49)45 (50)20 (51)f (52)0 (53)0 (54)0 (55)0 (56)0 (57)0 (58)0 (59)0 (60)0 (61)0 (62)0 (63)0 (64)0 (65)0 (66)0 (67)0 (68)0 (69)0 (70)0 (71)0 (72)0 (73)0 (74)0 (75)0 (76)0 (77)0 (78)0 (79)0 (80)0 (81)0 (82)0 (83)0 (84)0 (85)0 (86)0 (87)0 (88)0 (89)0 (90)0 (91)0 (92)43 (93)6f (94)70 (95)79 (96)72 (97)69 (98)67 (99)68 (100)74 (101)20 (102)28 (103)63 (104)29 (105)20 (106)32 (107)30 (108)30 (109)33 (110)20 (111)53 (112)65 (113)61 (114)67 (115)61 (116)74 (117)65 (118)20 (119)41 (120)6c (121)6c (122)20 (123)0 (124)0 (125)0 (126)0 (127)0 (128)0 (129)0 (130)0 (131)77 (132)fd (133)c0 (134)40 (135)77 (136)ff (137)6 (138)24 )

It's size 0, just like you said. Thanks much!

[Steve Post]

Look at the flags you used with the ioscan. That -u flag means you don't scan the actual hardware. Instead I would have run:

ioscan -fun > myfile.old
ioscan -fn >myfile.new

Then examine the two files.

This way you might see if the hardware was present before, and has since gone away.

[Robert-Jan Goossens]

#diskinfo -v /dev/rdsk/c2t5d0
SCSI describe of /dev/rdsk/c2t5d0:
vendor: HP 73.4G
product id: ST373453LC
type: direct access
size: 0 Kbytes < ----
bytes per sector: 0

Above disk is reporting a size of 0 Kb, you should try to find a replacement disk for above disk.

Regards,
Robert-Jan