Need Help! - cannot open device to run fsck

[Mark Vollmers]

I was trying to run fsck on our RAID drive, since it was screwed up. I booted into single user mode, and typed in
fsck -F vxfs -y -o full /dev/vgraid/home

it tells me that it cannot open device /dev/vgraid/home

I know that this is the right path for it. What am I doing wrong? it will run fsck during a normal boot up, but I want to be able to do it in single user mode. Thanks!

Mark

[Patrick Wallek · Accepted solution]

You need to make sure the volume group is activated before you do an fsck. To activate the volume group in single-user mode do:

vgchange -a y /dev/vgraid

None of the volume groups are activated by default when coming up in single user mode.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi Mark,

I suspect you need to do a vgchange -a y /dev/vgraid to activate the volume group.

[Mark Vollmers]

Hi, guys. Thanks for the quick responses. I typed in vgchange -a y /dev/vgraid and I got

lv_readvgdats: could not read VGDA 2 header and trailer from disk H/W path 8/0.0.0 (error = 22)
couldn't activate /dev/vgraid

what now? I'm in over my head. Thanks!

Mark

[Stefan Farrelly]

Sounds like your disk is knackered because HP-UX cant read the LVM info off of it.

To test the disk itself it ok see if you can dd if;

dd if=/dev/rdsk/cxxxxx of=/dev/null bs=1024k

See if it runs through without erorr. Even if it does looks like youre going to need to restore LVM info to the disk using vgcfgrestore, but your data will be gone.

[Mark Vollmers]

I just tried the command again, on a whim, and it worked fine. It's running fsck now. Who knows what's going on. All I know is there are some serious errors there. Oh, the fun. Anyway, thanks for all the help. You guys ROCK!

Mark

[Patrick Wallek]

Mark,

I found a similar message in the ITRC TKB. Have a look at this link and see if it helps. Is there anything going on on the disk array? Are the controllers OK? Disks OK? Any rebuilds going on?

http://us-support.external.hp.com/cki/bin/doc.pl/sid=079a77a9136a3d7710/screen=ckiDisplayDocument?docId=200000015248061

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Hi Mark,

This has bad device written all over it.
The only thing I can suggest is to try to READ
a few blocks from the raw device to /dev/null;
I assume you have checked cabling - we couldn't be that lucky.

Good luck (I think you're going to need it), Clay

[Mark Vollmers]

Patrick-

We just swapped the controller on the drive, but it keeps crashing on me during backup. I'm not sure if it is hardware or software, at this point, becuase it is behaving weird and keeps doing different stuff. I'm ready to call tech support, since I've been unable to get backups for a few weeks, and I have no idea what to do anymore. Hopefully, they can fix it.

Mark