Mirror boot disk issue

[Adam Noble]

All,

Have a bit of a strange issue, hope somebody can explain. We have an L2000 server with internal mirrored root disks on seperate controllers. We recently had a primary root disk failure. On boot the server attempted to boot from secondary disk, however only managed to get to single user mode. Strangely when the primary disk was replaced with a new disk we were then able to boot from secondary path and mirror onto new primary disk. Seems to suggest a SCSI issue while the old primary was dead.....Any ideas?

[Robert-Jan Goossens]

Hi Adam,

Are you shore your root volumegroup was configured correctly ?

# setboot
Primary bootpath : 0/0/1/1.2.0
Alternate bootpath : 0/0/2/0.2.0

Autoboot is ON (enabled)
Autosearch is ON (enabled)

# lvlnboot -v
Boot Definitions for Volume Group /dev/vg00:
Physical Volumes belonging in Root Volume Group:
/dev/dsk/c1t2d0 (0/0/1/1.2.0) -- Boot Disk
/dev/dsk/c2t2d0 (0/0/2/0.2.0) -- Boot Disk
Boot: lvol1 on: /dev/dsk/c1t2d0
/dev/dsk/c2t2d0
Root: lvol3 on: /dev/dsk/c1t2d0
/dev/dsk/c2t2d0
Swap: lvol2 on: /dev/dsk/c1t2d0
/dev/dsk/c2t2d0
Dump: lvol2 on: /dev/dsk/c1t2d0, 0

HTH,
Robert-Jan

[Adam Noble]

Yep we know the configuration is correct we were able to boot from the 2nd disk when the original primary disk was replaced.

[Denver Osborn]

It's possible that when the mirror was created, the auto string didn't specify no quorum.

to verify...

# lifcp -a /dev/rdsk/cXtXdX:AUTO -

Do the above for the disk you attempted to boot from but could only get to single user mode on. You'll probably see "hpux" and not "hpux -lq". Update the autofile to allow no quorum boot from the mirror.

# mkboot -a "hpux -lq" /dev/rdsk/cXtXdX

hope this helps,
-denver

[Trond Haugen]

The problem was definitely quorum. With one disk gone you had 50% or less of the disk in the VG and no quorum. With the disk replaced you had quorum as 100% of the disk where present. Even if the syncronisation of the mirror had yet to be done.

Regards,
Trond

[Adam Noble]

Ok I think the issue is likely to have related to quorum and have seen similar before. However it is not as straightforward as 1st appears my secondary disk has a lif header of hpux -lq however the primary does not. Unsure exactly what impact this has as it was the secondary disk we wanted to boot from?