Powerfailed disk?

[Brad Andriese]

System: G40 HP-UX 10.10

The messages below used to appear in the syslog once a week or so. All of the sudden, they're happening every minute or so. The messages seen below repeat in the same pattern with different times. What causes this? If the drive was bad, why does the system think everything is back to normal a split-second or the same second later?

May 14 16:20:54 ginger vmunix: Disk at 52.3.0 is not responding. Check device, power, and cables.
May 14 16:20:54 ginger vmunix: LVM: vg[1]: pvnum=0 (dev_t=0x1c013000) is POWERFAILED
May 14 16:20:54 ginger vmunix: LVM: PV 0 has been returned to vg[1].

P.S. This thread has been moved from Disk to HP-UX > sysadmin. -HP Forum Moderator

[Bob Inglis · Accepted solution]

Disk at 52.3.0 is not responding. Check device, power, and cables means that the system tried to access the disk and was unable to get a response.

LVM: vg[1]: pvnum=0 (dev_t=0x1c013000) is POWERFAILED means that the system waited a predefined time period and then gave up trying to reach device /c1t3d0.

LVM: PV 0 has been returned to vg[1] means that the device started responding again.

This cluster of messages usually means that maintenance is happening on the disk. (recalibration, sparing tracks, retries, etc.)
Sometimes it means that the SCSI bus is hung, but those are usually followed by a bus reset.

Suggested action: Run diagnostics on the drive in question (in this case /dev/dsk/c1t3d0, 52.3.0) Check the fault log and the growing defect list using STM. I suspect you will find problems.