VERITAS Volume Manager 3.5 Troubleshooting Guide (August 2002)

Recovery from Boot Disk Failure

Introduction

VERITAS Volume Manager (VxVM) protects systems from disk and other hardware

failures and helps you to recover from such events. This chapter describes recovery

procedures and information to help you prevent loss of data or system access due to the

failure of the boot (root) disk.

For information about recovering volumes and their data on non-boot disks, see

“Recovery from Hardware Failure” on page 1.

Note Rootability, which brings the root disk under VERITAS Volume Manager control, is

supported in this release of VxVM on HP-UX 11i.

VxVM Boot Disk Recovery

If a failed primary boot disk is under VxVM control and is mirrored, follow these steps to

replace it:

1. Replace the failed boot disk. Depending on the system hardware, this may require

you to shut down and power off the system.

2. Boot the system from a mirror of the root disk, and use the following command to

initialize the replacement disk:

# /etc/vx/bin/vxdisksetup -iB rootdisk_access_name privlen=1024

Whererootdisk_access_name is thedisk access nameof the root disk (forexample,

c0t0d0).

3. Run the vxdiskadm command, and use option 4 (Replace a failed or

removed disk) to deﬁne the newly initialized disk as the replacement for the root

disk (usually rootdisk01).

4. Run the vxrecover command, and allow the plexes on the replacement root disk to

be completely resynchronized.