HPUX 10.20 mkboot clobbered my data disk

[Michael Lampi]

The boot drive on my trusty 715/50 web server died.

I thought I had a replacement drive all ready to go, except it wouldn't boot.

Aha! I must have forgotten to run mkboot on it!

I booted up on another system, ran mkboot /dev/rdsk/c0t3d0, and discovered that the would-be boot drive was actually at /dev/rdsk/c0t4d0.

Well, this should not be a problem, according to the mkboot man page, as it is supposed to accommodate a pre-existing file system.

This is Not True, unfortunately.

fsck of the volume results in an effectively empty directory with about 37% free space remaining on the disk drive.

Use of fsck -b 16 doesn't work any better, and I seem to have misplaced the sbtab entry for the drive.

Does anyone have an idea as to how I can recover this HFS formatted disk, other than going to an old backup?

Thanks!

Michael

[A. Clay Stephenson]

The problem is that this disk was not pvcreated using pvcreate -B and thus no room was reserved for the boot areas. Mkboot then blindly did as it was told. Restoring from backup is really your only option. This was a case of that dumb 'ole 'puter doing just what it was told to do. Give yourself a dope slap and don't do it no more.

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi Michael,

Poor luck!!.. You could have tried 'vgcfgrestore' on it if it is part of LVM. Not after losing the superblocks. Try
the superblocks from /var/adm/sbtab file.

I guess you have to restore it from the backups.

-Sri