VERITAS Volume Manager 4.1 Troubleshooting Guide

Recovery from Hardware Failure

Forcibly Restarting a Disabled Volume

Chapter 1 17

Forcibly Restarting a Disabled Volume

If a disk failure caused a volume to be disabled, and the volume does not contain any valid

redundant plexes, you must restore the volume from a backup after replacing the failed disk.

Any volumes that are listed as Unstartable must be restarted using the vxvol command

before restoring their contents from a backup:

# vxvol [-g diskgroup] -o bg -f start volume

The -f option forcibly restarts the volume, and the -obg option resynchronizes its plexes as a

background task. For example, to restart the volume myvol so that it can be restored from

backup, use the following command:

# vxvol -g mydg -o bg -f start myvol

Clearing the Falling Flag for a Disk

If I/O errors are intermittent rather than persistent, VERITAS Volume Manager sets the

failing ﬂag on a disk, rather than detaching the disk. Such errors can occur due to the

temporary removal of a cable, controller faults, a partially faulty LUN in a disk array, or a

disk with a few bad sectors or tracks.

If the hardware fault is not with the disk itself (for example, it is caused by problems with the

controller or the cable path to the disk), you can use the vxedit command to unset the failing

ﬂag after correcting the source of the I/O error.

CAUTION Do not unset the failing ﬂag if the reason for the I/O errors is unknown. If the

disk hardware truly is failing, and the ﬂag is cleared, there is a risk of data loss.

To clear the failing ﬂag on a disk:

• Use the vxdisklist command to ﬁnd out which disks are failing:

# vxdisk list

DEVICE TYPE DISK GROUP STATUS

c1t1d0 auto:simple mydg01 mydg online

c1t1d0 auto:simple mydg02 mydg online failing