Identify Drives

[Marc Berman]

Hello,
Our J5600 crashed and the boot drive didn't start up on restart. Well the user thought they would try the drive in another slot. He didn't note the drive locations when he pulled the 3 other "good" drives.
Our problem is this - We got the boot drive running but we not sure which slot the other three drives go. All of them use logical volumes. Is there an easy way to find out which one goes where? We don't want to loose the data/configurations.

[Marc Berman]

I forgat to note that we are running 11.11

[spex]

Marc,

Are all of the drives the same model? Did you happen to capture 'ioscan' output from before the drives were pulled to a file?

PCS

[Marc Berman]

Yes they are all the same model

[Marc Berman]

No we don't have an ioscan

[Marc Berman]

Here's a question what happens to the LVM's and data if we boot the systems and the drives are incorrectly placed?

[Sandman!]

>Here's a question what happens to the LVM's and data if we boot the systems and the drives are incorrectly placed?

Maybe LVM won't recognize the PVs as belonging to the VG since the H/W paths will be different and so will the device file names. Worst case is data loss and corruption. Your best bet is to leave it to the experts by opening a support call with HP.

[Michal Toth]

you should not lose any data on those disk, but most likely you won't be able to boot since the paths are different now and if all those disks belong to vg00, then it won't get activated during the boot process..

your options here:
- boot into lvm maintenance (and fix lvm if succesful)
- boot off ignite tape or installation media and start recovery shell, fix lvm from recovery shell

[Marc Berman]

The boot drive contains vg00 and that one is the only one running now. It's the other 3 drives that we are unsure of. My thinking was that if all we get is errors I would just keep trying until they were correctly placed.

[OldSchool]

Marc,

Well...there are a grand total of six combinations of the three disks in question, so the number isn't insurmountable. As to whether or not the data will get scrambled, I don't know.

I *think* I'd talk to the HP storage support.

Good luck, hope you get this sorted out

[Marc Berman]

Thanks for everyone's comments. I positioned the drives in the order I thought they should be, used vgscan and restarted. Everything is back to normal.