When Disaster Strikes

[Ben Davis_1]

My hard drive recently crashed and as a result, I had to reboot my system. Now, during the boot up process, tons of errors relating to the disk volume pop up and the machine fails to boot. I want to run a diagnostic check on my hard drive to try and figure out what's wrong but I don't know how. Is there a way to run 'fschk' or a similar command before the HP-UX kernel is loaded in order to check\fix the integrity of my hard drive? TIA.

[Mark Vollmers · Accepted solution]

Ben-

To run 'fsck', go into single user mode. During bootup, near the start, there should be a prompt that says hit a button to interrupt boot up. You have about 10 seconds. From there, at the prompt, type "boot pri isl" You should get the ISL prompt. From there, type "hpux -is". This should boot you into single user mode. once it is done, you can run "fsck", which will should check everything. It should fix errors if it can. You may want to run it a few times if you get a bunch of errors. When it is clean, type "reboot -n" and hopefully the system will start up. Good Luck!

Mark

[Pedro Sousa]

Hi Ben.
If you want to boot your system without going through kernel, you need to boot it from the Support CD.
- Insert your CD
- start-up the system
- interrupt it when you see the message relating those 10 seconds
- type "sea" (this will search for bootable devices)
- type "bo p#" where # is the number relating your CD drive.
- Answer "no" when it asks you if you want to interact with ISL.
try to fix your system.
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If this doesn't work, do you have a full backup? Made by network or to local tape?
If you have the first case, then you'll need "only" to install the OS and to configure your network, then restore it. If it's the 2nd, restore it.
good luck.

P.S.: can you post your error messages?