hp-ux box can not reboot after shutdown?

[jane zhang]

Hi all,
we have a hp-box with 4 external disks, we experienced some slow repsonse and our sys adm and I decide to do a shutdown.
We reboot the sytem by pressing the power switch, and the boot process stop at activating one of the LVM and system hang.

We turn off the sever and boot it in single user mode. and tried various things.
eg. dd if=/dev/rdsk/diskname of=/dev/null
the system hang again.
we can not even do fsck since we can not do vgchange, the system hangs.

How do we reboot the system by bypassing the bad volume group?

Thanks for your help!
Jane

[Michael Tully]

Once you have booted into single-user mode, are there any messages in the system logs or through 'dmesg' that show any problem relating to disks?

[Animesh Chakraborty]

Hi,
To bypass vgs to be activated at boot time
edit /etc/lvmrc file and make it 0

AUTO_VG_ACTIVATE=0

[Ashwani Kashyap]

Is it failing a quorum check . If yes then you can bypass it by using hpux -lq at ISL prompt .

[Anil C. Sedha]

Ashwani caught it.

That's the correct way of rebooting your system bypassing any problems in any bad volume groups or disks.

You can run all the way doing this.

Regards,
Anil

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi Jane,

You can follow the suggestion made by both Animesh as you are already in single user mode suggesting that it may not be an issue with the root volume group.

In single user mode,

edit /etc/lvmrc and set AUTO_VG_ACTIVATE=0.

Boot the system all the way. Other volume groups will not be activated.

Run ioscan -fnC disk and observe the disks. Compare them to see if all the disks in 'strings /etc/lvmtab' are seen. If not, you may have to fix the problems like bad disk, cable etc.,

Once the disks are shown in the ioscan, then you can activate the volume groups using vgchange -a y vg-name.

If there is any problem with the disks, you will see the errors there and post them.

Booting the system always with -lq is a good idea particularly if you have mirrors setup.


-Sri

[jane zhang]

Hi all,
Thanks for the reponse. Since we can not do anything about the two disks, we just did the vgexport to generate mapfile and output files in single user mode and then init 3 the system to multiple user mode.
We will probably need to replace the disk since any command( dd, diskinfo, lvchange) would hange.
Any procedure to replace the disk and restore everything would be very helpful given we have mapfile and output file from vgexport.

Thanks,
Jane