LIF magic?

[Melissa Murphy]

Hey there.

There was a big power outtage here yesterday and a few servers went boom. We got almost everything booted up this morning and things seem to be working fine, except for one HP. It gets:

"IPL error: bad LIF magic.

Error reading IPL."

and says something about the memory not being tested because of fastboot, yadda yadda. I took it off fastboot and tried rebooting. It takes me to the boot menu where I can specify a boot path and all sorts of other things, but nothing really seems to be working out for me. Firstly, I have no clue what LIF magic is. Is there an easy fix to this, or is there a real problem?

Thanks,
Melissa

[John Poff]

Melissa,

The LIF is the Logical Interchange Format file system, which is what your HP box tries to read from the boot disk first thing.

Here is a recent thread on the forum concerning this problem. Good luck!

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,1150,0xeba453921f1ad5118fef0090279cd0f9,00.html

[Patrick Wallek]

That is not a good error to have, as you've found out. It basically means that the area on the disk that contains all of the boot information has gotten royally clobbered.

Here is a document from the TKB that should help you recover. You will need to have either a DIAGNOSTICS CD, or an install CD depending on the version of your OS.

This link is for 11.X
http://us-support3.external.hp.com/cki/bin/doc.pl/sid=b0d8015702d0571847/screen=ckiDisplayDocument?docId=200000048194545

This link is for 10.X
http://us-support3.external.hp.com/cki/bin/doc.pl/sid=b0d8015702d0571847/screen=ckiDisplayDocument?docId=200000048161834

[Curt Thompson]

Hello Melissa,

Adding to the posts from John and Patrick, booting from your Support Plus CD starts a
menu-based utility that will allow you to replace the generic LIF area of your boot disk.
As a first pass, do the LIF replacement only regardless of the number of other options the utility offers you.

Once the LIF has been repaired (replaced), attempt to bootup again. If the damage was limited only to the LIF area, then you will be running again. However, if the damage was more severe, then you may need to boot the Support Plus disk again and select an additional option.

You may have to go through this process several times in an attempt to recover the boot disk.

Good Luck,
Curt