Harddisk Problem

[Daniel Schneider]

Hi all,
I'm admin of a HP-D210 with an external HardDisk Tower. Yesterday the system hangs, so that noone can login or ping the machine. Even there was no chance to login via the console Terminal. I observed, that the second LED of the external HD-Tower was blinking periodically (once per second). So I thought the HardDisk hangs.
So I switched off the Powercontrol and reboot the Machine. Then it hangs while booting. Then I switched off the Machine and the Tower and booted again - Now the Machine runs properly.

Here my Question:
When the Machine hangs again, and the HardDisk doesn't come up again, what could I do to boot the machine without this defect HD?

Thank you for every Help!

Best Regards
Daniel :-)

[John Palmer · Accepted solution]

Hi Daniel,

It's possible that one of the tower disks is causing the SCSI bus to 'hang'. If you are on HP-UX 11 then you could check the OLDsyslog for any SCSI related errors. You could also use one of the STM tools to check the system error logs.

If it happens again and the system won't boot with the tower connected you could try disconnecting the tower (and fitting a SCSI terminator) but presumably the system will have limited capability without the external disks.

If you have a maintenance contract then I would raise a hardware call. I'd also ensure that I'd got a good backup of the suspect drive.

Regards,
John

[Daniel Schneider]

Hi John,
thank you very much for your reply!
My OS is HP-UX 10.10.
I'm searching for a possibility to start the system without this one HD. I will move the critical Data to another HD, and then, when the HD is dead, I will start the system without this single HD.
Is there a chance to do this?
I have attached the syslog informations of this SystemHang. It whould be great, if you can tell me something about the Problem.

Best regards
Daniel :-)

[John Palmer]

Daniel,

Have a look at this previous forum thread:-
http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,1150,0x9b677e990647d4118fee0090279cd0f9,00.html

The Async write errors in your syslog point to this being a disk rather than a SCSI problem as you suspect.

Is the disk in a swappable bay? If so then you will be able to remove it easily. If not then it's a screwdriver or engineer job.

Hope this helps,
John