a dead disk?

[johnson]

Hi:

We recently had a power outage resulting in our HP-UX 9000/777 (10.20 OS) going down. On the reboot, I heard a sqeaking noise followed by a beep from the box. This was repeated 4 times. The boot stalled at the line:

/sbin/fsclean: /dev/dsk/s0t6d0 root device (ok). I tried rebooting 4 times after this. Each time I heard that sqeaking and beep noise and then the boot process stopped after the same line above. So I pressed ctrl-c and the boot process continued.

The machine booted up to multi user mode. I logged in as root. But the /users disk did not mount. I tried running fsck on the /users disk but I get an error that it "can't be opened errno=16" I heard that squeaking and beep sequence again (~4 times) as fsck was trying to work.

So, what can I do from here? Is the /users disk dead?

[Patrick Wallek]

A couple of things to try:

pvdisplay -v /dev/dsk/c?t?d0

diskinfo /dev/rdsk/c?t?d0

ioscan -fnC disk and check that ioscan can see the disk. Check the HW State and SW state. If it is dead it will probably show up there.

If the above pvdisplay or diskinfo fails then that is an indicator that your disk may be dead as well.

[John Bolene]

After trying to boot that many times, I would think that your disk is dead. Sometimes disks spinning for years do not spin back up after being powered down. The grease on the bearings is gone and the disk has been spinning only from momentum and it could have died at any time.
We can only hope that you have some kind of backup.
Call it in for maintenance if you have a support contract, if not, it is time to look for a replacement.
There are companies that specialize in retrieving data from dead disks, but that can be expensive.

[paul courry]

Two things..............

1. Each disk should have a green LED on the front. That LED will light up until the disk spins up and then goes out. Boot the machine and look at that LED real close.

2. On you support disk you have ODE and under ODE you have MAPPER. MAPPER will ping each possible SCSI address and tell you what device it thinks is there. No response means a dead disk. In you case if it fails to return an ID string it probably IS a dead disk and not a loose cable. Try it. It is the basic diagnostic tool used by CE's for dead drives.