AIX 5L base operating system

[ntruby]

I've just taken delivery of a new p520 and played around with mirroring the boot disk. Now the system hangs whilst booting up AIX at the "Closing stdin and stdout" message.

I'm sure it'll be easy to fix if I can boot into maiintenance mode. But IBM have not yet sent the BOS media and therefore I'm stuck. Is this easily available anywwhere? Download???

You know IBM - it could be Easter before we get the media ... :-((

thanks

 

[plamb]

what is the error code???

 

[ntruby]

No message.

The boot sequence starts, a load of "IBM"s right across the screen, then an AIX banner, than the AIX version, then Closing stdin and stdout ...... then nothing further, it just hangs :-(

The LED display on the front just says "AIX starting".

 

[kHz]

How did you mirror the boot disk?

 

[ntruby]

Through SMIT, I added new disk hdisk0 to the rootvg, then mirrored the rootvg.

Then bootlist -m normal hdisk3 hdisk0

(hdisk3 being the original member). Then rebooted. And it hasn;t worked since.

Obviously something went wrong because if I interrupt the boot sequence and go into the admin section where you can change the boot device sequence and ask the system to scan for bootable devices, it identifies just one disk - presumably the original one.

I feel sure that this would be easy to fix if only I had a BOS installation disk - which makes me with the benefit of hindsight a bit of an arse playing around with the rootvg before I made sure I had the media.

 

[kHz]

Uh, yeah something was wrong before you mirrored because hdisk0 should have been the original mirrored to hdisk1. How did hdisk3 become the first disk, and what happened to hdisk0,1,2?

You should be able to go into the SMS menu and select hdisk3 as the boot device. You wouldn't need the CD media.

 

[ntruby]

I don't know how hdisk3 became the original disk in rootvg. The OS was installed by the distributor. I imagine they installed it there for some reason.

I can't use the maintenance thingy - to be clear, this is a p620 maintenance screen that is reached before AIX is booted -
to boot from any other disk than the one that's hanging, because only one (the one that's failing) of the 8 disks is presented by the menu as a valid device for booting.

 

[plamb]

if you didn't sync the disks after you told it to mirror (it take a fair amount of time depending on size of disks) you have only a partial mirror.did you set reset the quorum to 1 if not it thinks it needs 2 good disks for rootvg since you said rootvg has 2.

 

[ntruby]

Yes, I wondered about that. But wuldn't I expect some sort of boot-up message to the effect that a quorum isn't present, and the opportunity to intervene from some sort of single-user mode? That's what I'd get on Solaris anyway

As I say, I tried to boot into boot into single-user mode but that hangs too.

Is there ANYTHING I can do in the continued absence of the media would you think?

cheers

 

[sbix]

You should also issue the bosboot -ad /dev/hdisk0 too before to bootstrap ...
Now try to boot from SMS menu a couple of time by using different disk .... one should be the original hdisk3

 

[ntruby]

The maintenance menu will only "allow" me to select one of the 8 disks for booting :-(