HPUX 10.20 hangs during boot

[Jesse_17]

HPUX 10.20 hangs during boot sequence. I get the following messages:
/sbin/bccheckrc
checking for LVM volume groups and activating (if any exist)
Activated volume group
Volume group /dev/extdisk2 has been successfully changed.

After the 'successfully changed' message, the boot process just hangs.
I'm looking for a way to break out of this so I can boot to single user mode & look at the syslog and event.log files to find out what is wrong.

I've tried a variety of ways of breaking out (control-\, etc). I've also tried powering it off, then hitting ESCAPE when the boot process starts. This brings me to the BOOTADMIN> prompt.
I've tried commands from here as well with no success, so far. Any suggestions are welcome.

[Patrick Wallek]

Once you get to BOOTADMIN you should be able to do something like:

bo pri

hpux -is

and that will boot you into single user mode.

What I would then do is

# vgchange -a y /dev/extdisk2

to activate the VG and then see what it does from there.

What this sounds like to me is that the VG is mirrored and and got out-of-sync and when you rebooted the machine the VG automatically activated and then automatically started doing a 'vgsync' to sync up all the LVs withing the VG. The machine would appear to hang since the vgsync operation has to finish before it will proceed with the next VG.

If you do the 'vgchange' above while in single-user mode you will probably see the same behavior. I don't know if it would work but you could try doing a 'vgchange -a y /dev/extdisk2 &' to put the vgchange in the background so you can still have the command prompt. If you do that, do a 'ps -ef | grep vgsync' to see if there is a vgsync process running.

Are there LVs within this VG that are mirrored? If so, I would start looking there for the problem.

[omars]

If the above procedure still
hangs for the command
vgchange -a y /dev/extdisk2

then perform
vgchange -a y -q /dev/extdisk2


If it still fails , then give
us the output of
strings /etc/lvmtab .
This will then gives us the number of physical volumes in the volume group /dev/extdisk2

rgds,
omari