Veritas Volume Manager 4.1 Troubleshooting Guide (HP-UX 11i v3, February 2007)

Chapter 3, Recovery from Boot Disk Failure

Recovery by Booting from Recovery Media

Starting VxVM after Booting from Recovery Media

You can use the vx_emerg_start utility to start VxVM after booting a system from

recovery media. This command allows a rootable VxVM configuration to be repaired in

the event of a catastrophic failure. The command is invoked as shown here:

# vx_emerg_start hostname

The hostname argument specifies the name (node name) of the system that you are

repairing. This name must match the name of the system that you are repairing, because it

is unlikely to be recorded on the recovery media from which you booted the system.

Recovering the Root Volume After VxVM Emergency Startup

After you have used vx_emerg_start to start VxVM, use the vxprint command to

determine the configuration state.

One common problem is that all the plexes of the root volume, rootvol, are stale. This

would be shown in the STATE field of the vxprint output as follows:

TY NAME ASSOC KSTATE LENGTH PLOFFS STATE ...

v rootvol root DISABLED 393216 - ACTIVE ...

pl rootvol-01 rootvol DISABLED 393216 - STALE ...

sd rootdisk01-02 rootvol-01 ENABLED 393216 0 - ...

pl rootvol-02 rootvol DISABLED 393216 - STALE ...

sd rootdisk02-02 rootvol-02 ENABLED 393216 0 - ...

Note The TUTIL0 and PUTIL0 fields have been removed from the vxprint output for

readability.

When this happens, the root volume can usually be repaired by using the following

command:

# vxvol -g bootdg -f start rootvol

If the root volume is mirrored, recovery is started. Wait until recovery completes and the

command exits. Then run the fsck command and mount the root file system as shown

here:

# fsck -F vxfs -o full /dev/vx/rdsk/bootdg/rootvol

# mkdir /tmp_mnt

# mount -F vxfs /dev/vx/dsk/bootdg/rootvol /tmp_mnt

The following form of the vx_emerg_start command combines all these operations in a

single command to recover the root volume and its mirrors, check the root file system, and

mount it:

# vx_emerg_start -m hostname