IBM 950 (AIX 3.2) hangs after "autovaryon volume groups"

[SteveB42]

Hello everyone... I have this problem, and I know, I know... should have made more than one backup tape. Here's the problem. I rebooted the server and it never came back... just stuck on "autovaryon volume groups" and no LED indicator. Booted from diagnostic diskettes and we found hdisk0 bad. Had it replaced, and formatted/certified but since we cannot locate a working backup tape, I'm stuck. Is there a way to do a telnet/break or get it to boot in single-user or something? Any ideas would be appreciated!!!

Thanks,

Steve

 

[SteveB42]

Oh, and when I try to boot in service mode, I get the dreaded flashing "888!"

 

[bi]

hdisk0 more than likely had the boot logical volume on it as well as the rest of (or part of) the OS. Was hdisk0 mirrorred?

 

[SteveB42]

To be honest I am not sure... if hdisk0 was mirrored wouldn't it still boot? Thanks for any help you can give!

Steve

 

[bi]

It wouldn't boot unless the mirror disk was in your bootlist. This is at least in 4.x. I'm not sure about 3.x. Since it isn't booting, I would guess not.

You don't happen to have a mksysb tape or diskette, do you?

 

[SteveB42]

I made a set of bosboot disks on another machine, and a mksysb tape. It gives me an I/O error, regardless of which tape drive I use... I am going to make another mksysb tape, thinking that the tape is probably bad... I'll let you know how it turns out...

Thanks!

:-]

 

[dvbrown]

Do you have volume groups other than root? If so, and you don't manage to recover root, you could re-install AIX and then import the other vg's. You could then at least get at your application data.