SERVER DOWN.....PLEASE HELP

[Gamoji Raghavendra]

Hello all,

Couple of days back, power cable of one of my HP-UX boxes (K580, HP-UX 11.00, 2 GB RAM) got disconnected and when I replugged it, the server does not come up.

It gives a panic message after loading vmunix and goes for reboot. This cycle repeats. I have to power off the system and leave it. I could not even go into single user mode.

I get the following error message before panic:

Checking root file system.
/dev/root : No such file or directory.
Root check Done.
Panic :
System Panic : all VFS_MOUNTROOTs failed

It starts crash dump after this message and goes for reboot.

A week ago, I had to increase SWAP space on the server. So I created a LV using SAM, configured it to be SWAP LV with priority 1 and enabled it to be mounted at BOOT. After that SAM gave a message that it has to reconfigure the kernel to enable this swap lv, and I let it do that. The server was rebooted without any problems after that.
Is this the root cause of this problem?

I'ld appreciate any help in this regard.

Thanks,
Raghu.

[Tom Geudens]

Hi,
Can you boot in Maintenance Mode (interrupt boot, interact with ipl, hpux -lm) ?
The problem seems to be that you've created a separate filesystem to be root's home ... and that this filesystem cannot be mounted.

Regards,
Tom Geudens

[Steve Steel]

Hi


maintenance mode is a good bet.


If that does not do it then it will have to be boot from cd.try and repair disks.


if you have a good backup then you may be cleanest to reinstall and reload the backup.



Steve Steel

[Ceesjan van Hattum]

If you cannot interupt the bootsequence to get into ISL mode (to enter single user mode), it cannot be that your last modifications as mentioned (config swap) is the cause of this; also because of the fact that there was a successfull reboot between the change and the failure.
Very likely the /dev/root is damaged. It looks like a hardware error. I hope you have a hardware support contract for this...

But are you really sure you cannot enter ISL mode by pressing ESC at the beginning of the boot?? IF you can.. then: hpux /stand/vmunix.prev

Success,
Ceesjan

[Michael Tully]

Hi,

What you have done in regards to the swap
would not stop your server from being
brought up.

There are a couple of things you could try.

First try to boot the system from the ISL>
prompt after interrupting the boot cycle
at the 10 second interrupt question. From
the ISL prompt

ISL> hpux -lm
This will attempt to boot the machine
without the LVM quorum, so to try to
establish whether there is a problem with
the root disk. If this fails it could be
that your root disk is toast.

If you root disk is mirrored you should try
and boot from it by again interrupting
the boot sequence and specifying the path
of the secondary disk.

Cheers
~Michael~

[Gamoji Raghavendra]

Hi Guys,
Seems like I have ran out of all the chances.
I tried all the options you suggested before posting this query.

I run into the same situation when I boot in maintainence mode. So as M.Tully says, my root disk is down.

I donot have mirroring activated :(

So I will try recovering the system from Ignite tape....

anyhow, thanks once again for all your help...

bye,
raghu.

[Wim Rombauts]

WAIT !

Have you tried to boot from the Recovery and Diagnostics CD ?

You can boot with this CD and start a recovery shell. Look at your disks, fix some stuff, load a new temporary kernel, correct LVM configurations ...

If you have a recent Ignite tape and a good backup, that's OK, but if there are many things to recover manually, I would give the CD a try.