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

38 Recovering from boot disk failure
Initiating VxVM Maintenance Mode Boot
3 When you have recovered the volumes on the VxVM root disk, and
performed any other necessary repairs, reboot the system:
# reboot
Fixing a missing or corrupt /etc/vx/volboot file
The following messages may be displayed at boot time if the /etc/vx/volboot
file is missing or its contents are incorrect:
vxvm:vxconfigd: ERROR: enable failed: Volboot file not loaded
transactions are disabled.
vxvm:vxconfigd: FATAL ERROR: Bootdg cannot be imported during
boot
Error returned from vxconfigd -m boot, halting
During system bootup, the VxVM configuration daemon reads the file /etc/
vx/volboot. If that file is missing or corrupted, the configuration daemon fails
and aborts the boot sequence.
To fix a missing or corrupt /etc/vx/volboot file
1 Reboot the system from recovery media, and run the following command:
# vx_emerg_start -m hostname
This determines if the volboot file is present, and rewrites it if it is not
present.
Initiating VxVM Maintenance Mode Boot
Another method for performing limited recovery on a VxVM boot disk is to use
the VxVM Maintenance Mode Boot (MMB).
To initiate VxVM MMB
1 Boot the system from the primary or secondary boot device, and enter the
following command at the ISL boot prompt:
hpux -vm
This causes the bootloader and the HP-UX kernel to take alternate actions
in finding the parts of the system that are required to boot the system.
The bootloader starts reading the stand file system at 1KB block 3168
instead of locating it from the LIF label. The VxVM kernel rootability code
uses root volume extent information in the /stand/rootconf file to set
up the extents of the root volume, and
init is instructed to bring the system
up to single-user mode. When invoked from the
pre_init_rc script, the
vxconfigd daemon exits gracefully if it determines from the kernel that the
system is in MMB mode. The system is left running with only the root
volume mounted, and VxVM runs with temporary objects pointing to the
root volume.