Veritas Volume Manager 5.0.1 Troubleshooting Guide, HP-UX 11i v3, First Edition, November 2009

To forcibly start a RAID-5 volume with stale subdisks
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Specify the -f option to the vxvol start command.
# vxvol [-g diskgroup] -f start r5vol
This causes all stale subdisks to be marked as non-stale. Marking takes place
before the start operation evaluates the validity of the RAID-5 volume and
what is needed to start it. You can mark individual subdisks as non-stale by
using the following command:
# vxmend [-g diskgroup] fix unstale subdisk
If some subdisks are stale and need recovery, and if valid logs exist, the volume
is enabled by placing it in the ENABLED kernel state and the volume is available
for use during the subdisk recovery. Otherwise, the volume kernel state is
set to DETACHED and it is not available during subdisk recovery. This is done
because if the system were to crash or if the volume were ungracefully stopped
while it was active, the parity becomes stale, making the volume unusable.
If this is undesirable, the volume can be started with the -o unsafe start
option.
Warning: The -o unsafe start option is considered dangerous, as it can
make the contents of the volume unusable. It is therefore not recommended.
The volume state is set to RECOVER, and stale subdisks are restored. As the
data on each subdisk becomes valid, the subdisk is marked as no longer stale.
If the recovery of any subdisk fails, and if there are no valid logs, the volume
start is aborted because the subdisk remains stale and a system crash makes
the RAID-5 volume unusable. This can also be overridden by using the -o
unsafe start option.
If the volume has valid logs, subdisk recovery failures are noted but they do
not stop the start procedure.
When all subdisks have been recovered, the volume is placed in the ENABLED
kernel state and marked as ACTIVE.
Recovering from an incomplete disk group move
If the system crashes or a subsystem fails while a disk group move, split or join
operation is being performed, VxVM attempts either to reverse or to complete
27Recovering from hardware failure
Recovering from an incomplete disk group move