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

Chapter
1
Recovery from hardware
failure
Symantec’s Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) protects systems from disk and
other hardware failures and helps you to recover from such events. This chapter
describes recovery procedures and information to help you prevent loss of data
or system access due to disk and other hardware failures.
If a volume has a disk I/O failure (for example, because the disk has an
uncorrectable error), VxVM can detach the plex involved in the failure. I/O stops
on that plex but continues on the remaining plexes of the volume.
If a disk fails completely, VxVM can detach the disk from its disk group. All
plexes on the disk are disabled. If there are any unmirrored volumes on a disk
when it is detached, those volumes are also disabled.
Note: Apparent disk failure may not be due to a fault in the physical disk media
or the disk controller, but may instead be caused by a fault in an intermediate or
ancillary component such as a cable, host bus adapter, or power supply.
The hot-relocation feature in VxVM automatically detects disk failures, and
notifies the system administrator and other nominated users of the failures by
electronic mail. Hot-relocation also attempts to use spare disks and free disk
space to restore redundancy and to preserve access to mirrored and RAID-5
volumes. For more information, see the “Administering Hot-Relocation” chapter
in the Veritas Volume Manager Administrator’s Guide.
Recovery from failures of the boot (root) disk requires the use of the special
procedures described in “Recovering from boot disk failure” on page 35.