Veritas Volume Manager 5.0 Troubleshooting Guide Guide (September 2006)

37Recovery 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.
Note: HP recommends that you use expert recovery to recover a VxVM system.
Recovering VxVM manually from a recovery shell is a rather tedious process.
After using expert recovery, system will boot into VxVM Maintenance Mode
automatically. You do not need to re-run vx_emerg_start after expert
recovery. Expert recovery will execute vx_emerg_start to start VxVM.
Once VxVM is started, you must verify your VxVM volumes.
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:
TYNAME ASSOC KSTATE LENGTH PLOFFS STATE ...
v rootvol root DISABLED 393216 - ACTIVE ...
plrootvol-01 rootvol DISABLED 393216 - STALE ...
sdrootdisk01-02rootvol-01 ENABLED 393216 0 - ...
plrootvol-02 rootvol DISABLED 393216 - STALE ...
sdrootdisk02-02rootvol-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