Veritas Volume Manager 5.0 Troubleshooting Guide, HP-UX 11i v3, First Edition, May 2008

13Recovery from hardware failure

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 -o bg 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 failing 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:

1 Use the

vxdisk list 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

c1t1d0 auto:simple mydg03 mydg online

. . .

2 Use the vxedit set command to clear the flag for each disk that is marked

as failing (in this example, mydg02):

# vxedit set failing=off mydg02