HPUX 10.20 Will not boot???

[Henry Goverde]

A customer had 2 disks go bad in a K460 server. These disks were part of mirrors for seperate logical volumes so the server was still functional, but performance was sluggish.

The disks were part of VG01 and VG06 which contain only applications and data.

The customer decided maybe a reboot would help out (not knowing the disks were bad).

Once the server was restarted it would not successfully boot into multi user mode until the bad disks were replaced.

Prior to the replacement disks arrival, we tried to activate the VG's with quarrum overridden, but it would just hang with the defective drives lights flashing every 5 seconds.

Is this normal????
If so, MirrorUX seems to have some serious limitations. A restart should be possible.

Would pulling the defective disks out be the correct proceedure to start the system?

The server is patched to either December 98, or March 99 releases.

TIA

Henry.

[Lasse Knudsen · Accepted solution]

I would clearly pull out the bad disks. It is trying to access those disks and I would imagine what you see is SCSI retries/resets. Mirror/UX can see the disks but they are not working properly, so when the OS tries to access them it hangs.

[Stefan Farrelly]

Its not a mirror ux problem, its a physical hardware problem on a disk. It all depends how badly the disk fails. If it simply powers off, fine, the system will use the mirror and carry on running fine. If it continually sends out SCSI resets then youre in trouble - you will need to remove the bad disk(s) asap. Once a disk goes bad you shouldnt reboot unless youve either replaced them or pulled them out, as the power cycle may turn a not so bad failure into a bad one - as in your case.

Yes, remove the bad disks and your server will carry on running fine until you can replace them.

[CHRIS_ANORUO]

There is nothing wrong with mirror disk software as Stefan rightly pointed out. The best safeguard against this problem is to have a recovery tape and an upto date backup.

[Henry Goverde]

It seems relatively odd that two disks can go bad in the same manner (and at about the same time)so as to render a system unable to fully boot (Single user mode only). I would have thought that the system and mirror software would try to access the disk for a number of attempts and then access the mirror in order to mount the file system.

I have seen Novell systems boot and function with one of the mirror disks bad, even if the operating system is on the mirrored disks. (And the SW mirroring with NetWare is free.)

In my opinion, the functionality of either MirrorDiskUX or the Jamaica enclosures in which the disks reside) is not up to the standards one would expect from HP.