Booting from alternate drive

[Tim Medford]

Strange problem when booting from our alternate root disk. Server is L1000 running HPUX 11.0 64 bit.

The system comes up fine and everything works ok, but early during the boot process I get the following message for each physical volume:

lvlnboot: Warning: couldn't query physical volume "/dev/dsk/c4t1d0":
The specified path does not correspond to physical volume attached to this volume group. This message repeats for each physical volumne.

Then later in the boot process I get the normal messages saying:

Activated volume group
Volume group "/dev/vg04" has been successfully changed. This also repeats for each VG. It does the sanity checks and everything is fine. System comes up perfectly, all file systems mounted correctly.

I don't understand why it cannot query those physcial volumes when they are there and functioning correctly?

Thanks in advance for any ideas.

Tim

[harry d brown jr]

Is your alternate root disk a mirror of your primary root disk - created using mirrorux?

live free or die
harry

[PIYUSH D. PATEL]

Hi,

try lvlnboot -v and check

Check for other syslog messages.....may be some problems with the disk.

dd if=/dev/rdsk/c1t2d0 /dev/null bs=512k

I hope that you have created the mirror disk for the root.

Piyush

[Tim Medford]

I do not have mirrorUX. I created the boot disk manually. I've done this on numerous other servers with no problems.

There's a long number of steps involved, but essentially I end up with a /dev/vgroot vg, with all the same LVs as the root disk.

The root files are all cpio'd over to the new root disk. I edit /etc/fstab so that the root LVs mount on /dev/vgroot instead of /dev/vg00.

[Helen French · Accepted solution]

1) The first message you 've given is an issue with incorrect entries in /etc/lvmtab. If you are booting from the mirrored root disk, then there are possibility that the vg00 is not defined *first* in the lvmtab. Do:

# strings /etc/lvmtab - to find out about this.
If you find a problem, then you need to vgexport all VGs listed above vg00 and import it back. Then edit /sbin/ioinitrc and change '/sbin/lvlnboot -c' to '/sbin/lvlnboot -c vg00'

Is this is not the mirrored disk, then you need to configure the VGs and disk in the new root disk (vgimport)

2) The second message given is a normal message indicates that your VG is activated.

[Pete Randall]

Tim,

What is /dev/dsk/c4t1d0? Is it the original boot disk, or is it the alternate?

Pete

[Pete Randall]

Disregard previous query - I now see that you said "for each physical volume", so c4t1d0 must just be an example.

Pete

[Tim Medford]

Shiju - When I do the strings on lvmtab is looks like this.

/dev/vg00
/dev/dsk/c1t2d0
/dev/vg01
/dev/dsk/c4t1d0
/dev/vg02
/dev/dsk/c4t2d0
/dev/vg04
/dev/dsk/c4t4d0
/dev/vg05
/dev/dsk/c4t12d0
/dev/vg06
/dev/dsk/c4t13d0
/dev/vg07
/dev/dsk/c4t14d0
/dev/vg08
/dev/dsk/c4t15d0
/dev/vgroot
/dev/dsk/c2t2d0

The alternate disk I'm attempting to boot from is c2t2d0 (the last one in the list). I wonder if this is the problem.

The primary root disk does appears first and maybe that's why I don't see these errors when booting from it, only the alternate.

[S.K. Chan]

All you have to do is (while you're running on the alternate boot path) modify /sbin/ioinitrc replace line ..
/sbin/lvlnboot -c
to
/sbin/lvlnboot -c /dev/vgroot
and that should get rid of the messages. You don't have to mess with lvmtab file at all. Actually the error message is non-destructive, what happened is upon bootup /sbin/ioinitrc will try to activate the root VG first and it searches lvmtab file entries one by one for it, thus the error you seen since "vgroot" is at the last line. If you specifically tell it to look for "vgroot" then it'll skip the rest.
After the change is made, reboot your system and you should be fine.

[Helen French]

I don't know how your setup works for the alternate disk, but seems like there is a problem.

I think the problem is with the sequence itself as I described before. When you boot from the alternate disk - /dev/dsk/c2t2d0 (/dev/vgroot), it comes at the last after every VGs in the /etc/lvmtab. The vg00 should come in the first. When you boot from your original root disk (primary), you don't have problem as it is defined first.

If you are pretty sure that this setup works with other systems, I would recommend you to verify the steps which you followed in this particular system. A possible solution could be vgexport and vgimport all other VGs and follow the step provided in my previous post.

The BEST option would be to use Mirror-UX !

[Tim Medford]

Shiju and S.K -

Thanks very much, you were both correct. The problem was simply the order in lvmtab.

When I added this line to the ioinitrc in the /sbin on the alternate drive it worked perfectly!

sbin/lvlnboot -c /dev/vgroot

Incidentally, we have a copy of MirrorUX but I've always opted to not use it. I don't like the overhead, and the list of bugs and patches with that software is scary!

I much prefer creating a separate boot disk manually and occasionally re-syncing it. Just my 2 cents.

[S.K. Chan]

That's the first time I heard someone who does not want to use "Mirror/UX" :)
Overhead, maybe a little, bugs none that I've ever encounter.
my $0.02 too ..

[Helen French]

Again, Glad that it worked for you =))

But, about Mirror-UX, I won't agree with that:(( I 've been using this software for years and never had any errors/issues with that ! And patches, that's one most important thing that you need to do even if Mirror-UX is not present in the system. Update the system with latest patches and never expect any unnecessary shutdown time!

[Tim Medford]

I understand your position, thanks for the feedback.

When I first started using HPUX in the mid 90's I had a bunch of trouble making MirrorUX work, mostly due to my inexperience I'm sure. It just left a bad impression with me.

I like to take a minimalist approach to systems administration, the fewer moving parts the better. Less to patch, less things to break.

I have also learned a lot about the boot/startup process by manually building these root disks.

Again, just my 2 cents. To each his own.