Minor number issue

[Yogeeraj_1]

Dear experts!

There is one internal disk on our system that does not seem to have been allocated to any volume groups. When trying to create a new Volume group to use this disk, we got the following error message:
The command used to create volume groups, /sbin/vgcreate, has failed. The stderr output from the command is shown below. The volume group has not been created. vgcreate: Minor number of /dev/vg02/group is not unique. /dev/vgexport2/group has the same minor number

When we queried our /dev/, we found the following:

Server1:dev>ll |grep vg
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 8192 Dec 7 2002 vg00
drwxrwxrwx 2 root sys 96 Mar 3 2007 vg01
dr-xr-xr-x 2 root sys 96 Nov 21 17:03 vg02
drwxrwxrwx 2 root sys 96 Aug 31 2002 vgexport
drwxrwxrwx 2 root sys 96 Dec 9 2002 vgexport2
drwxrwxrwx 2 root sys 96 Aug 31 2002 vgoradata
drwxrwxrwx 2 root sys 96 Aug 31 2002 vgoradata1
drwxrwxrwx 2 root sys 96 Aug 31 2002 vgorainst
Server1:dev>cd vg02
Server1:dev/vg02>ll
total 0
cr--r--r-- 1 root sys 64 0x060000 Nov 21 17:03 group
Server1:dev/vg02>ll ../vgexport2/
total 0
crw-rw-rw- 1 root sys 64 0x060000 Dec 9 2002 group
Server1:dev/vg02>l


How do we proceed with fixing this issue?

Thanking you in advance for your replies.

Kind regards,
Yogeeraj

[Sandy Chen]

Hi,

You are creating a new VG isn't it? Then you just have to run mknod that using another minor number

Regards,
Sandy

[Kapil Jha]

Hi Yogi,
You need to check free minor numbers in /dev//group directory.
Just use the minor number which is not used in any of the vg's.
Create node by command
#cd /dev
#ls -l */group and check for the minor number which is in hexadecimal. here 06 is the minor number for vg02.
cr--r--r-- 1 root sys 64 0x060000 Nov 21 17:03 group

Then create new node by
#mknod /dev//group c 64 0x0000

and the try creating VG.
I hoipe this would help.
BR,
Kapil

[Yogeeraj_1]

hi Kapil and Sandy,

thank you both for you replies.

if you look at the output posted above, there already exists vg02 in /dev/

Note that we used SAM to perform the operation.

There is also the vgexport2 volume group. Should we just do a rm -rf /dev/vgexport2 ?


please advise.

kind regards,
Yogeeraj

[Gabriel Suchter]

Hi,

if you are getting to create vg02 volume group and you don't need vgexport2 then you can simply remove it with rm -r /dev/vgexport2 command.
What version of HP-UX you are running? It's little bit strange that SAM try to create VG with same group file minor number as VG already created. Do you have installed recommended patches on that system?

Gabriel

[whiteknight]

Hi Yogeeraj,

You seems to have conflict minor number, please remove /dev/vgexport2, if you do not use it anymore.

cr--r--r-- 1 root sys 64 0x060000 Nov 21 17:03 group
Server1:dev/vg02>ll ../vgexport2/
total 0
crw-rw-rw- 1 root sys 64 0x060000 Dec 9 2002 group
Server1:dev/vg02>

WK

[Kapil Jha]

Just remove the node you are not using currently.And recreate using different minor number.
BR,
Kapil

[rajdev]

Hi Yogeeraj,

whenever you create new VG, make sure that the group minor number is unique.
you can do this easily by running
# ls -lR|grep group|sort -n -k6 , then create a group file in your new vg dir by adding 1 to the last minor number ...

eg :-
# cd /dev
# ls -lR|grep group|sort -n -k6
crw-r----- 1 root sys 64 0x000000 Sep 20 17:01 group
crw-rw-rw- 1 root sys 64 0x010000 Sep 27 17:13 group
crw-rw-rw- 1 root sys 64 0x020000 Sep 26 15:37 group
crw-rw-rw- 1 root sys 64 0x030000 Sep 27 11:59 group
crw-rw-rw- 1 root sys 64 0x040000 Oct 8 10:04 group
crw-rw-rw- 1 root sys 64 0x050000 Oct 8 14:10 group
crw-rw-rw- 1 root sys 64 0x060000 Nov 13 18:38 group

here my last minor number is 0x060000 so make the new group file with 0x070000 ....

In your case remove the group file in vgexport2 and create again as shown above ..

Regards,
RD

[Sandy Chen]

Hi,

Check your already used minor number,

# ll /dev/vg*/group

remove the group for vgexport2:

# rm /dev/vgexport2/group

re-create the group with mknode:

# mknod /dev/vgexport2/group -c 64 0x0?0000 -> replace ? with unused minor number

after this, continue with vgcreate, it's weird tough, if you used SAM to create the vg, it should have used a different minor number.

Regards,
Sandy

[Yogeeraj_1]

Thank you all for your replies.

The problem now is that we have files (group) with minor corresponding to 0x060000.

Server1:dev>ll /dev/*/group |sort -n -k6
cr--r--r-- 1 root sys 64 0x060000 Oct 25 17:03 /dev/vg02/group
crw-r----- 1 root sys 64 0x000000 Aug 2 2002 /dev/vg00/group
crw-rw-rw- 1 root sys 64 0x010000 Aug 27 2002 /dev/vg01/group
crw-rw-rw- 1 root sys 64 0x020000 Aug 31 2002 /dev/vgorainst/group
crw-rw-rw- 1 root sys 64 0x030000 Aug 31 2002 /dev/vgoradata/group
crw-rw-rw- 1 root sys 64 0x040000 Aug 31 2002 /dev/vgexport/group
crw-rw-rw- 1 root sys 64 0x050000 Aug 31 2002 /dev/vgoradata1/group
crw-rw-rw- 1 root sys 64 0x060000 Dec 9 2002 /dev/vgexport2/group
Server1:dev>


How do we cleanup and proceed?

kind regards
yogeeraj

[Geoff Wild · Accepted solution]

rm -rf /dev/vg02

mkdir /dev/vg02
mknod /dev/vg02/group c 64 0x070000


vgcreate -s 32 -p 64 -e 32768 /dev/vg02 /dev/dsk/cXtXdX /dev/dsk/cXtXdX


where cXtXdX are the disks you want to add...

Rgds...Geoff