Veritas Volume Manager

Troubleshooting Guide

Solaris

5.0

N18520F
Veritas Volume Manager
Troubleshooting Guide
Copyright © 2006 Symantec Corporation. All rights reserved.

Veritas Volume Manager 5.0

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 Contents

Chapter 1 Recovery from hardware failure

Listing unstartable volumes ................................................................................. 8

Displaying volume and plex states ...................................................................... 8

Understanding the plex state cycle ..................................................................... 9

Recovering an unstartable mirrored volume ..................................................11

Recovering an unstartable volume with a disabled plex in the RECOVER state

12

Forcibly restarting a disabled volume ..............................................................13

Clearing the failing flag for a disk .....................................................................13

Reattaching failed disks ......................................................................................14

Failures on RAID-5 volumes ..............................................................................15

System failures .............................................................................................15

Disk failures ..................................................................................................16

Default startup recovery process for RAID-5 .........................................17

Recovering a RAID-5 volume .....................................................................18

Recovery after moving RAID-5 subdisks ..................................................20

Starting RAID-5 volumes ............................................................................21

Recovering from incomplete disk group moves ..............................................24

Recovery from failure of a DCO volume ...........................................................25

Recovering a version 0 DCO .......................................................................27

Recovering a version 20 DCO .....................................................................28

Chapter 2 Recovery from failure of instant snapshot operations

Failure of vxsnap prepare ...................................................................................30

Failure of vxsnap make for full-sized instant snapshots ..............................30

Failure of vxsnap make for break-off instant snapshots ...............................31

Failure of vxsnap make for space-optimized instant snapshots ..................31

Failure of vxsnap restore ....................................................................................31

Failure of vxsnap reattach or refresh ...............................................................32

Copy-on-write failure ..........................................................................................32

I/O errors during resynchronization ................................................................33

I/O failure on a DCO volume ..............................................................................33

Chapter 3 Recovery from boot disk failure

Possible root, swap, and usr configurations ...................................................35

6 Contents

Booting from alternate boot disks .................................................................... 36

The boot process on SPARC systems ................................................................ 37

Hot-relocation and boot disk failure ................................................................ 38

Unrelocating subdisks to a replacement boot disk ................................ 38

Recovery from boot failure ................................................................................ 39

Boot device cannot be opened .................................................................... 39

Cannot boot from unusable or stale plexes ............................................. 40

Invalid UNIX partition ................................................................................ 41

Incorrect entries in /etc/vfstab ................................................................ 42

Missing or damaged configuration files ................................................... 43

Repairing root or /usr file systems on mirrored volumes ............................. 45

Recovering a root disk and root mirror from backup tape ................... 46

Re-adding and replacing boot disks .................................................................. 49

Re-adding a failed boot disk ...................................................................... 49

Replacing a failed boot disk ....................................................................... 50

Recovery by reinstallation ................................................................................. 52

General reinstallation information .......................................................... 52

Reinstalling the system and recovering VxVM ....................................... 53

Chapter 4 Logging commands and transactions

Logging commands .............................................................................................. 63

Logging transactions ........................................................................................... 66

Associating command and transaction logs .................................................... 68

Chapter 5 Backing up and restoring disk group configurations

Backing up a disk group configuration ............................................................ 70

Restoring a disk group configuration ............................................................... 71

Resolving conflicting backups for a disk group ...................................... 72

Chapter 6 Error messages

Logging error messages ...................................................................................... 75

Configuring logging in the startup script ................................................ 76

Understanding messages ................................................................................... 77

Messages ....................................................................................................... 79

Index 125

 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 “Recovery from boot disk failure” on page 35. The
chapter also includes procedures for repairing the root (/) and usr file
systems.
8 Recovery from hardware failure
Listing unstartable volumes

Listing unstartable volumes

An unstartable volume can be incorrectly configured or have other errors or
conditions that prevent it from being started. To display unstartable volumes,
use the vxinfo command. This displays information about the accessibility and
usability of volumes:
# vxinfo [-g diskgroup] [volume ...]
The following example output shows one volume, mkting, as being unstartable:
home fsgen Started

mkting fsgen Unstartable

src fsgen Started

rootvol root Started

swapvol swap Started

Displaying volume and plex states

To display detailed information about the configuration of a volume including
its state and the states of its plexes, use the following form of the vxprint
command:
# vxprint [-g diskgroup] -hvt [volume ...]
The following example shows a disabled volume, vol, which has two clean
plexes, vol-01 and vol-02, each with a single subdisk:

# vxprint -g mydg -hvt vol

Disk group: mydg

V NAME RVG/VSET/CO KSTATE STATE LENGTH READPOL PREFPLEX UTYPE

PL NAME VOLUME KSTATE STATE LENGTH LAYOUT NCOL/WID MODE

SD NAME PLEX DISK DISKOFFSLENGTH [COL/]OFF DEVICE MODE

SV NAME PLEX VOLNAME NVOLLAYRLENGTH [COL/]OFF AM/NM MODE

SC NAME PLEX CACHE DISKOFFSLENGTH [COL/]OFF DEVICE MODE

DC NAME PARENTVOL LOGVOL

SP NAME SNAPVOL DCO

v vol - DISABLED ACTIVE 212880 SELECT - fsgen

pl vol-01 vol DISABLED CLEAN 212880 CONCAT - RW

sd mydg11-01 vol-01 mydg11 0 212880 0 c1t0d0 ENA

pl vol-02 vol DISABLED CLEAN 212880 CONCAT - RW

sd mydg12-01 vol-02 mydg12 0 212880 0 c1t1d0 ENA

See the “Creating and Administering Plexes” and “Administering Volumes”

chapters in the Veritas Volume Manager Administrator’s Guide for a description
of the possible plex and volume states.
 Recovery from hardware failure 9
Understanding the plex state cycle

Understanding the plex state cycle

Changing plex states are part of normal operations, and do not necessarily
indicate abnormalities that must be corrected. A clear understanding of the
various plex states and their interrelationship is necessary if you want to be able
to perform the recovery procedures described in this chapter.
Figure 1-1 shows the main transitions that take place between plex states in
VxVM. (For more information about plex states, see the chapter “Creating and
Administering Plexes” in the Veritas Volume Manager Administrator’s Guide.)

Figure 1-1 Main plex state cycle

Start up
(vxvol start)

PS: CLEAN PS: ACTIVE

PKS: DISABLED PKS: ENABLED

Shut down
(vxvol stop)
PS = plex state
PKS = plex kernel state

At system startup, volumes are started automatically and the vxvol start task
makes all CLEAN plexes ACTIVE. At shutdown, the vxvol stop task marks all
ACTIVE plexes CLEAN. If all plexes are initially CLEAN at startup, this indicates
that a controlled shutdown occurred and optimizes the time taken to start up
the volumes.
Figure 1-2 shows additional transitions that are possible between plex states as
a result of hardware problems, abnormal system shutdown, and intervention by
the system administrator.
When first created, a plex has state EMPTY until the volume to which it is
attached is initialized. Its state is then set to CLEAN. Its plex kernel state
remains set to DISABLED and is not set to ENABLED until the volume is started.
10 Recovery from hardware failure
Understanding the plex state cycle

Figure 1-2 Additional plex state transitions

Create plex

PS: EMPTY PS: ACTIVE

PKS: DISABLED PKS: DISABLED
After crash and
reboot (vxvol
start)
Initialize plex Start up Recover data (vxvol
(vxvol init clean) (vxvol start) resync) Take plex offline
(vxmend off)

PS: CLEAN PS: ACTIVE PS: OFFLINE

PKS: DISABLED PKS: ENABLED PKS: DISABLED

Resync data (vxplex

att)
Shut down (vxvol
stop) Put plex online
(vxmend on)
Uncorrectable I/O
failure
Resync fails
PS: IOFAIL PS: STALE
PKS: DETACHED PKS: DETACHED
PS = plex state
PKS = plex kernel state

After a system crash and reboot, all plexes of a volume are ACTIVE but marked
with plex kernel state DISABLED until their data is recovered by the vxvol
resync task.
A plex may be taken offline with the vxmend off command, made available again
using vxmend on, and its data resynchronized with the other plexes when it is
reattached using vxplex att. A failed resynchronization or uncorrectable I/O
failure places the plex in the IOFAIL state.
“Recovering an unstartable mirrored volume” on page 11, and subsequent
sections describe the actions that you can take if a system crash or I/O error
leaves no plexes of a mirrored volume in a CLEAN or ACTIVE state.
For information on the recovery of RAID-5 volumes, see “Failures on RAID-5
volumes” on page 15 and subsequent sections.
 Recovery from hardware failure 11
Recovering an unstartable mirrored volume

Recovering an unstartable mirrored volume

A system crash or an I/O error can corrupt one or more plexes of a mirrored
volume and leave no plex CLEAN or ACTIVE. You can mark one of the plexes
CLEAN and instruct the system to use that plex as the source for reviving the
others as follows:
1 Place the desired plex in the CLEAN state using the following command:
# vxmend [-g diskgroup] fix clean plex

For example, to place the plex vol01-02 in the CLEAN state:

# vxmend -g mydg fix clean vol01-02

2 To recover the other plexes in a volume from the CLEAN plex, the volume
must be disabled, and the other plexes must be STALE. If necessary, make
any other CLEAN or ACTIVE plexes STALE by running the following
command on each of these plexes in turn:
# vxmend [-g diskgroup] fix stale plex
3 To enable the CLEAN plex and to recover the STALE plexes from it, use the
following command:
# vxvol [-g diskgroup] start volume
For example, to recover volume vol01:
# vxvol -g mydg start vol01
For more information about the vxmend and vxvol command, see the
vxmend(1M) and vxvol(1M) manual pages.

Note: Following severe hardware failure of several disks or other related

subsystems underlying all the mirrored plexes of a volume, it may be impossible
to recover the volume using vxmend. In this case, remove the volume, recreate it
on hardware that is functioning correctly, and restore the contents of the
volume from a backup or from a snapshot image.
12 Recovery from hardware failure
Recovering an unstartable volume with a disabled plex in the RECOVER state

Recovering an unstartable volume with a disabled

plex in the RECOVER state
A plex is shown in the RECOVER state if its contents are out-of-date with respect
to the volume. This can happen if a disk containing one or more of the plex’s
subdisks has been replaced or reattached. If a plex is shown as being in this
state, it can be recovered as follows:
1 Use the following command to force the plex into the OFFLINE state:
# vxmend [-g diskgroup] -o force off plex
2 Place the plex into the STALE state using this command:
# vxmend [-g diskgroup] on plex
3 If there are other ACTIVE or CLEAN plexes in the volume, use the following
command to reattach the plex to the volume:
# vxplex [-g diskgroup] att plex volume
If the volume is already enabled, resynchronization of the plex is started
immediately.
If there are no other clean plexes in the volume, use this command to make
the plex DISABLED and CLEAN:
# vxmend [-g diskgroup] fix clean plex
4 If the volume is not already enabled, use the following command to start it,
and preform any resynchronization of the plexes in the background:
# vxvol [-g diskgroup] -o bg start volume

Note: If the data in the plex was corrupted, and the volume has no ACTIVE
or CLEAN redundant plexes from which its contents can be resynchronized,
it must be restored from a backup or from a snapshot image.
 Recovery from hardware failure 13
Forcibly restarting a disabled volume

Forcibly restarting a disabled volume

If a disk failure caused a volume to be disabled, and the volume does not contain
any valid redundant plexes, you must restore the volume from a backup after
replacing the failed disk. Any volumes that are listed as Unstartable must be
restarted using the vxvol command before restoring their contents from a
backup:
# vxvol [-g diskgroup] -o bg -f start volume

The -f option forcibly restarts the volume, and the -o bg option resynchronizes
its plexes as a background task. For example, to restart the volume myvol so
that it can be restored from backup, use the following command:
# vxvol -g mydg -o bg -f start myvol

Clearing the failing flag for a disk

If I/O errors are intermittent rather than persistent, Veritas Volume Manager
sets the failing flag on a disk, rather than detaching the disk. Such errors can
occur due to the temporary removal of a cable, controller faults, a partially
faulty LUN in a disk array, or a disk with a few bad sectors or tracks.
If the hardware fault is not with the disk itself (for example, it is caused by
problems with the controller or the cable path to the disk), you can use the
vxedit command to unset the failing flag after correcting the source of the
I/O error.

Caution: Do not unset the failing flag if the reason for the I/O errors is
unknown. If the disk hardware truly is failing, and the flag is cleared, there is a
risk of data loss.

To clear the failing flag on a disk:

1 Use the vxdisk list command to find out which disks are failing:
# vxdisk list

DEVICE TYPE DISK GROUP STATUS

c1t1d0s2 auto:sliced mydg01 mydg online

c1t2d0s2 auto:sliced mydg02 mydg online failing

c1t3d0s2 auto:sliced mydg03 mydg online

. . .

2 Use the vxedit set command to clear the flag for each disk that is marked
as failing (in this example, mydg02):
# vxedit set failing=off mydg02
14 Recovery from hardware failure
Reattaching failed disks

3 Use the vxdisk list command to verify that the failing flag has been
cleared:
# vxdisk list

DEVICE TYPE DISK GROUP STATUS

c1t1d0s2 auto:sliced mydg01 mydg online

c1t2d0s2 auto:sliced mydg02 mydg online

c1t3d0s2 auto:sliced mydg03 mydg online

. . .

Reattaching failed disks

You can perform a reattach operation if a disk could not be found at system
startup, or if VxVM is started with some disk drivers unloaded and unloadable
(causing disks to enter the failed state). If the underlying problem has been
fixed (such as a cable or controller fault), use the vxreattach command to
reattach the disks without plexes being flagged as STALE. However, the reattach
must occur before any volumes on the disk are started.
The vxreattach command is called as part of disk recovery from the
vxdiskadm menus and during the boot process. If possible, vxreattach
reattaches the failed disk media record to the disk with the same device name.
Reattachment places a disk in the same disk group that it was located in before
and retains its original disk media name.
To reattach a failed disk:
1 Use the vxdisk list command to see which disks have failed, as shown in
the following example:
# vxdisk list

DEVICE TYPE DISK GROUP STATUS

c1t1d0s2 auto:sliced mydg01 mydg online

c1t2d0s2 auto:sliced mydg02 mydg online

- - mydg03 mydg failed was:

c1t3d0s2

- - mydg04 mydg failed was:

c1t4d0s2

2 Once the fault has been corrected, the disks can be reattached by using the
following command to rescan the device list:
# /usr/sbin/vxdctl enable
3 Use the vxreattach command with no options to reattach the disks:
# /etc/vx/bin/vxreattach
After reattachment takes place, recovery may not be necessary unless a disk was
faulty and had to be replaced. Reattachment can fail if the original (or another)
cause for the disk failure still exists.
 Recovery from hardware failure 15
Failures on RAID-5 volumes

You can use the command vxreattach -c to check whether reattachment is

possible, without performing the operation. Instead, it displays the disk group
and disk media name where the disk can be reattached.
See the vxreattach(1M) manual page for more information on the vxreattach
command.

Failures on RAID-5 volumes

Failures are seen in two varieties: system failures and disk failures. A system
failure means that the system has abruptly ceased to operate due to an
operating system panic or power failure. Disk failures imply that the data on
some number of disks has become unavailable due to a system failure (such as a
head crash, electronics failure on disk, or disk controller failure).

System failures
RAID-5 volumes are designed to remain available with a minimum of disk space
overhead, if there are disk failures. However, many forms of RAID-5 can have
data loss after a system failure. Data loss occurs because a system failure causes
the data and parity in the RAID-5 volume to become unsynchronized. Loss of
synchronization occurs because the status of writes that were outstanding at
the time of the failure cannot be determined.
If a loss of sync occurs while a RAID-5 volume is being accessed, the volume is
described as having stale parity. The parity must then be reconstructed by
reading all the non-parity columns within each stripe, recalculating the parity,
and writing out the parity stripe unit in the stripe. This must be done for every
stripe in the volume, so it can take a long time to complete.

Caution: While the resynchronization of a RAID-5 volume without log plexes is

being performed, any failure of a disk within the volume causes its data to be
lost.

Besides the vulnerability to failure, the resynchronization process can tax the
system resources and slow down system operation.
RAID-5 logs reduce the damage that can be caused by system failures, because
they maintain a copy of the data being written at the time of the failure. The
process of resynchronization consists of reading that data and parity from the
logs and writing it to the appropriate areas of the RAID-5 volume. This greatly
reduces the amount of time needed for a resynchronization of data and parity. It
also means that the volume never becomes truly stale. The data and parity for
all stripes in the volume are known at all times, so the failure of a single disk
cannot result in the loss of the data within the volume.
16 Recovery from hardware failure
Failures on RAID-5 volumes

Disk failures
An uncorrectable I/O error occurs when disk failure, cabling or other problems
cause the data on a disk to become unavailable. For a RAID-5 volume, this means
that a subdisk becomes unavailable. The subdisk cannot be used to hold data and
is considered stale and detached. If the underlying disk becomes available or is
replaced, the subdisk is still considered stale and is not used.
If an attempt is made to read data contained on a stale subdisk, the data is
reconstructed from data on all other stripe units in the stripe. This operation is
called a reconstructing-read. This is a more expensive operation than simply
reading the data and can result in degraded read performance. When a RAID-5
volume has stale subdisks, it is considered to be in degraded mode.
A RAID-5 volume in degraded mode can be recognized from the output of the
vxprint -ht command as shown in the following display:

V NAME RVG/VSET/COKSTATE STATE LENGTH READPOL PREFPLEX UTYPE

PL NAME VOLUME KSTATE

STATE LENGTH LAYOUT NCOL/WID MODE
SD NAME PLEX DISK
DISKOFFS LENGTH [COL/]OFF DEVICE MODE
SV NAME PLEX VOLNAME
NVOLLAYR LENGTH [COL/]OFF AM/NM MODE
...

v r5vol - ENABLED
DEGRADED 204800 RAID - raid5
pl r5vol-01 r5vol ENABLED
ACTIVE 204800 RAID 3/16 RW
sd disk01-01 r5vol-01disk01
0 102400 0/0 c2t9d0 ENA
sd disk02-01 r5vol-01disk02
0 102400 1/0 c2t10d0 dS
sd disk03-01 r5vol-01disk03
0 102400 2/0 c2t11d0 ENA
pl r5vol-02 r5vol ENABLED
LOG 1440 CONCAT - RW
sd disk04-01 r5vol-02disk04
0 1440 0 c2t12d0 ENA
pl r5vol-03 r5vol ENABLED
LOG 1440 CONCAT - RW
sd disk05-01 r5vol-03disk05
0 1440 0 c2t14d0 ENA

The volume r5vol is in degraded mode, as shown by the volume state, which is
listed as DEGRADED. The failed subdisk is disk02-01, as shown by the MODE
flags; d indicates that the subdisk is detached, and S indicates that the subdisk’s
contents are stale.

Note: Do not run the vxr5check command on a RAID-5 volume that is in

degraded mode.

A disk containing a RAID-5 log plex can also fail. The failure of a single RAID-5
log plex has no direct effect on the operation of a volume provided that the
RAID-5 log is mirrored. However, loss of all RAID-5 log plexes in a volume makes
it vulnerable to a complete failure. In the output of the vxprint -ht command,
failure within a RAID-5 log plex is indicated by the plex state being shown as
BADLOG rather than LOG. This is shown in the following display, where the
RAID-5 log plex r5vol-02 has failed:
 Recovery from hardware failure 17
Failures on RAID-5 volumes

V NAME RVG/VSET/COKSTATE STATE LENGTH READPOL PREFPLEX UTYPE

PL NAME VOLUME KSTATE STATE LENGTH LAYOUT NCOL/WID MODE

SD NAME PLEX DISK DISKOFFS LENGTH [COL/]OFF DEVICE MODE

SV NAME PLEX VOLNAME NVOLLAYR LENGTH [COL/]OFF AM/NM MODE

...

v r5vol - ENABLED ACTIVE 204800 RAID - raid5

pl r5vol-01 r5vol ENABLED ACTIVE 204800 RAID 3/16 RW

sd disk01-01 r5vol-01disk01 0 102400 0/0 c2t9d0 ENA

sd disk02-01 r5vol-01disk02 0 102400 1/0 c2t10d0 ENA

sd disk03-01 r5vol-01disk03 0 102400 2/0 c2t11d0 ENA

pl r5vol-02 r5vol DISABLED BADLOG 1440 CONCAT - RW

sd disk04-01 r5vol-02disk04 0 1440 0 c2t12d0 ENA

pl r5vol-03 r5vol ENABLED LOG 1440 CONCAT - RW

sd disk05-01 r5vol-12disk05 0 1440 0 c2t14d0 ENA

Default startup recovery process for RAID-5

VxVM may need to perform several operations to restore fully the contents of a
RAID-5 volume and make it usable. Whenever a volume is started, any RAID-5
log plexes are zeroed before the volume is started. This prevents random data
from being interpreted as a log entry and corrupting the volume contents. Also,
some subdisks may need to be recovered, or the parity may need to be
resynchronized (if RAID-5 logs have failed).
VxVM takes the following steps when a RAID-5 volume is started:
1 If the RAID-5 volume was not cleanly shut down, it is checked for valid
RAID-5 log plexes.
■ If valid log plexes exist, they are replayed. This is done by placing the
volume in the DETACHED volume kernel state and setting the volume
state to REPLAY, and enabling the RAID-5 log plexes. If the logs can be
successfully read and the replay is successful, go to step 2.
■ If no valid logs exist, the parity must be resynchronized.
Resynchronization is done by placing the volume in the DETACHED
volume kernel state and setting the volume state to SYNC. Any log
plexes are left in the DISABLED plex kernel state.
The volume is not made available while the parity is resynchronized
because any subdisk failures during this period makes the volume
unusable. This can be overridden by using the -o unsafe start option
with the vxvol command. If any stale subdisks exist, the RAID-5
volume is unusable.

Caution: The -o unsafe start option is considered dangerous, as it can

make the contents of the volume unusable. Using it is not recommended.
18 Recovery from hardware failure
Failures on RAID-5 volumes

2 Any existing log plexes are zeroed and enabled. If all logs fail during this
process, the start process is aborted.
3 If no stale subdisks exist or those that exist are recoverable, the volume is
put in the ENABLED volume kernel state and the volume state is set to
ACTIVE. The volume is now started.

Recovering a RAID-5 volume

The types of recovery that may typically be required for RAID-5 volumes are the
following:
■ Parity resynchronization
■ Log plex recovery
■ Stale subdisk recovery
Parity resynchronization and stale subdisk recovery are typically performed
when the RAID-5 volume is started, or shortly after the system boots. They can
also be performed by running the vxrecover command.
For more information on starting RAID-5 volumes, see “Starting RAID-5
volumes” on page 21.
If hot-relocation is enabled at the time of a disk failure, system administrator
intervention is not required unless no suitable disk space is available for
relocation. Hot-relocation is triggered by the failure and the system
administrator is notified of the failure by electronic mail.
Hot relocation automatically attempts to relocate the subdisks of a failing RAID-
5 plex. After any relocation takes place, the hot-relocation daemon (vxrelocd)
also initiates a parity resynchronization.
In the case of a failing RAID-5 log plex, relocation occurs only if the log plex is
mirrored; the vxrelocd daemon then initiates a mirror resynchronization to
recreate the RAID-5 log plex. If hot-relocation is disabled at the time of a failure,
the system administrator may need to initiate a resynchronization or recovery.

Note: Following severe hardware failure of several disks or other related

subsystems underlying a RAID-5 plex, it may be impossible to recover the
volume using the methods described in this chapter. In this case, remove the
volume, recreate it on hardware that is functioning correctly, and restore the
contents of the volume from a backup.
 Recovery from hardware failure 19
Failures on RAID-5 volumes

Parity resynchronization
In most cases, a RAID-5 array does not have stale parity. Stale parity only occurs
after all RAID-5 log plexes for the RAID-5 volume have failed, and then only if
there is a system failure. Even if a RAID-5 volume has stale parity, it is usually
repaired as part of the volume start process.
If a volume without valid RAID-5 logs is started and the process is killed before
the volume is resynchronized, the result is an active volume with stale parity.
For an example of the output of the vxprint -ht command, see the following
example for a stale RAID-5 volume:

V NAME RVG/VSET/COKSTATE STATE LENGTH READPOL PREFPLEX UTYPE

PL NAME VOLUME KSTATE STATE LENGTH LAYOUT NCOL/WID MODE

SD NAME PLEX DISK DISKOFFS LENGTH [COL/]OFF DEVICE MODE

SV NAME PLEX VOLNAME NVOLLAYR LENGTH [COL/]OFF AM/NM MODE

...

v r5vol - ENABLED NEEDSYNC 204800 RAID - raid5

pl r5vol-01 r5vol ENABLED ACTIVE 204800 RAID 3/16 RW

sd disk01-01 r5vol-01disk01 0 102400 0/0 c2t9d0 ENA

sd disk02-01 r5vol-01disk02 0 102400 1/0 c2t10d0 dS

sd disk03-01 r5vol-01disk03 0 102400 2/0 c2t11d0 ENA

...

This output lists the volume state as NEEDSYNC, indicating that the parity needs
to be resynchronized. The state could also have been SYNC, indicating that a
synchronization was attempted at start time and that a synchronization process
should be doing the synchronization. If no such process exists or if the volume is
in the NEEDSYNC state, a synchronization can be manually started by using the
resync keyword for the vxvol command. For example, to resynchronize the
RAID-5 volume in the figure “Invalid RAID-5 volume” on page 22, use the
following command:
# vxvol -g mydg resync r5vol

Parity is regenerated by issuing VOL_R5_RESYNC ioctls to the RAID-5

volume. The resynchronization process starts at the beginning of the RAID-5
volume and resynchronizes a region equal to the number of sectors specified by
the -o iosize option. If the -o iosize option is not specified, the default maximum
I/O size is used. The resync operation then moves onto the next region until
the entire length of the RAID-5 volume has been resynchronized.
For larger volumes, parity regeneration can take a long time. It is possible that
the system could be shut down or crash before the operation is completed. In
case of a system shutdown, the progress of parity regeneration must be kept
across reboots. Otherwise, the process has to start all over again.
To avoid the restart process, parity regeneration is checkpointed. This means
that the offset up to which the parity has been regenerated is saved in the
20 Recovery from hardware failure
Failures on RAID-5 volumes

configuration database. The -o checkpt=size option controls how often the

checkpoint is saved. If the option is not specified, the default checkpoint size is
used.
Because saving the checkpoint offset requires a transaction, making the
checkpoint size too small can extend the time required to regenerate parity.
After a system reboot, a RAID-5 volume that has a checkpoint offset smaller
than the volume length starts a parity resynchronization at the checkpoint
offset.

Log plex recovery

RAID-5 log plexes can become detached due to disk failures. These RAID-5 logs
can be reattached by using the att keyword for the vxplex command. To
reattach the failed RAID-5 log plex, use the following command:
# vxplex -g mydg att r5vol r5vol-l1

Stale subdisk recovery

Stale subdisk recovery is usually done at volume start time. However, the
process doing the recovery can crash, or the volume may be started with an
option such as -o delayrecover that prevents subdisk recovery. In addition, the
disk on which the subdisk resides can be replaced without recovery operations
being performed. In such cases, you can perform subdisk recovery using the
vxvol recover command. For example, to recover the stale subdisk in the RAID-
5 volume shown in the figure “Invalid RAID-5 volume” on page 22, use the
following command:
# vxvol -g mydg recover r5vol disk05-00

A RAID-5 volume that has multiple stale subdisks can be recovered in one
operation. To recover multiple stale subdisks, use the vxvol recover command
on the volume, as follows:
# vxvol -g mydg recover r5vol

Recovery after moving RAID-5 subdisks

When RAID-5 subdisks are moved and replaced, the new subdisks are marked as
STALE in anticipation of recovery. If the volume is active, the vxsd command
may be used to recover the volume. If the volume is not active, it is recovered
when it is next started. The RAID-5 volume is degraded for the duration of the
recovery operation.
 Recovery from hardware failure 21
Failures on RAID-5 volumes

Any failure in the stripes involved in the move makes the volume unusable. The
RAID-5 volume can also become invalid if its parity becomes stale. To avoid this
occurring, vxsd does not allow a subdisk move in the following situations:
■ a stale subdisk occupies any of the same stripes as the subdisk being moved
■ the RAID-5 volume is stopped but was not shut down cleanly; that is, the
parity is considered stale
■ the RAID-5 volume is active and has no valid log areas
Only the third case can be overridden by using the -o force option.
Subdisks of RAID-5 volumes can also be split and joined by using the vxsd split
command and the vxsd join command. These operations work the same way as
those for mirrored volumes.

Note: RAID-5 subdisk moves are performed in the same way as subdisk moves
for other volume types, but without the penalty of degraded redundancy.

Starting RAID-5 volumes

When a RAID-5 volume is started, it can be in one of many states. After a normal
system shutdown, the volume should be clean and require no recovery.
However, if the volume was not closed, or was not unmounted before a crash, it
can require recovery when it is started, before it can be made available. This
section describes actions that can be taken under certain conditions.
Under normal conditions, volumes are started automatically after a reboot and
any recovery takes place automatically or is done through the vxrecover
command.

Unstartable RAID-5 volumes

A RAID-5 volume is unusable if some part of the RAID-5 plex does not map the
volume length:
■ the RAID-5 plex cannot be sparse in relation to the RAID-5 volume length
■ the RAID-5 plex does not map a region where two subdisks have failed
within a stripe, either because they are stale or because they are built on a
failed disk
When this occurs, the vxvol start command returns the following error
message:
VxVM vxvol ERROR V-5-1-1236 Volume r5vol is not startable; RAID-

5 plex does not map entire volume length.

At this point, the contents of the RAID-5 volume are unusable.

22 Recovery from hardware failure
Failures on RAID-5 volumes

Another possible way that a RAID-5 volume can become unstartable is if the
parity is stale and a subdisk becomes detached or stale. This occurs because
within the stripes that contain the failed subdisk, the parity stripe unit is invalid
(because the parity is stale) and the stripe unit on the bad subdisk is also invalid.
Figure 1-3 illustrates a RAID-5 volume that has become invalid due to stale
parity and a failed subdisk.

Figure 1-3 Invalid RAID-5 volume

W Data Data Parity W

disk00-00 disk01-00 disk02-00
X Data Data X
Parity
Y Parity Data Data Y

Z Data Data Parity Z

disk03-00 disk04-00 disk05-00

RAID-5 plex

This example shows four stripes in the RAID-5 array. All parity is stale and
subdisk disk05-00 has failed. This makes stripes X and Y unusable because two
failures have occurred within those stripes.
This qualifies as two failures within a stripe and prevents the use of the volume.
In this case, the output display from the vxvol start command is as follows:
VxVM vxvol ERROR V-5-1-1237 Volume r5vol is not startable; some

subdisks are unusable and the parity is stale.

This situation can be avoided by always using two or more RAID-5 log plexes in
RAID-5 volumes. RAID-5 log plexes prevent the parity within the volume from
becoming stale which prevents this situation (see “System failures” on page 15
for details).
 Recovery from hardware failure 23
Failures on RAID-5 volumes

Forcibly starting RAID-5 volumes

You can start a volume even if subdisks are marked as stale: for example, if a
stopped volume has stale parity and no RAID-5 logs, and a disk becomes
detached and then reattached.
The subdisk is considered stale even though the data is not out of date (because
the volume was in use when the subdisk was unavailable) and the RAID-5
volume is considered invalid. To prevent this case, always have multiple valid
RAID-5 logs associated with the array whenever possible.
To start a RAID-5 volume with stale subdisks, you can use the -f option with the
vxvol start command. 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. Also, 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 the volume was
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.

Caution: 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 any subdisk recovery fails and 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.

Caution: The -o unsafe start option is considered dangerous, as it can

make the contents of the volume unusable. It is therefore not
recommended.

If the volume has valid logs, subdisk recovery failures are noted but they do
not stop the start procedure.
24 Recovery from hardware failure
Recovering from incomplete disk group moves

■ When all subdisks have been recovered, the volume is placed in the
ENABLED kernel state and marked as ACTIVE. It is now started.

Recovering from incomplete disk group moves

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
the operation when the system is restarted or the subsystem is repaired.
Whether the operation is reversed or completed depends on how far it had
progressed.
Automatic recovery depends on being able to import both the source and target
disk groups. If this is not possible (for example, if one of the disk groups has
been imported on another host), perform the following steps to recover the disk
group:
1 Use the vxprint command to examine the configuration of both disk
groups. Objects in disk groups whose move is incomplete have their TUTIL0
fields set to MOVE.
2 Enter the following command to attempt completion of the move:
# vxdg recover sourcedg
This operation fails if one of the disk groups cannot be imported because it
has been imported on another host or because it does not exist:
VxVM vxdg ERROR V-5-1-2907 diskgroup: Disk group does not exist
If the recovery fails, perform one of the following steps as appropriate.
◆ If the disk group has been imported on another host, export it from that
host, and import it on the current host. If all the required objects already
exist in either the source or target disk group, use the following command to
reset the MOVE flags in that disk group:
# vxdg -o clean recover diskgroup1
Use the following command on the other disk group to remove the objects
that have TUTIL0 fields marked as MOVE:
# vxdg -o remove recover diskgroup2

◆ If only one disk group is available to be imported, use the following

command to reset the MOVE flags on this disk group:
# vxdg -o clean recover diskgroup
 Recovery from hardware failure 25
Recovery from failure of a DCO volume

Recovery from failure of a DCO volume

Note: The procedures in this section depend on the DCO version number. See the
Veritas Volume Manager Administrator’s Guide for information about DCO
versioning.

Persistent FastResync uses a data change object (DCO) volume to perform

tracking of changed regions in a volume. If an error occurs while reading or
writing a DCO volume, it is detached and the badlog flag is set on the DCO. All
further writes to the volume are not tracked by the DCO.
The following sample output from the vxprint command shows a complete
volume with a detached DCO volume (the TUTIL0 and PUTIL0 fields are omitted
for clarity):

TY NAME ASSOC
KSTATE LENGTH PLOFFS STATE ...

dg mydg mydg
- - - -

dm mydg01 c4t50d0s2
- 35521408 - -

dm mydg02 c4t51d0s2
- 35521408 - -

dm mydg03 c4t52d0s2
- 35521408 - FAILING

dm mydg04 c4t53d0s2
- 35521408 - FAILING

dm mydg05 c4t54d0s2
- 35521408 - -

v SNAP-vol1 fsgen
ENABLED 204800 - ACTIVE

pl vol1-03 SNAP-vol1
ENABLED 204800 - ACTIVE

sd mydg05-01 vol1-03
ENABLED 204800 0 -

dc SNAP-vol1_dco SNAP-vol1
- - - -

v SNAP-vol1_dcl gen
ENABLED 144 - ACTIVE

pl vol1_dcl-03 SNAP-vol1_dcl
ENABLED 144 - ACTIVE

sd mydg05-02 vol1_dcl-03
ENABLED 144 0 -

sp vol1_snp SNAP-vol1
- - - -

v vol1 fsgen
ENABLED 204800 - ACTIVE

pl vol1-01 vol1
ENABLED 204800 - ACTIVE

sd mydg01-01 vol1-01
ENABLED 204800 0 -

pl vol1-02 vol1
ENABLED 204800 - ACTIVE

sd mydg02-01 vol1-01
ENABLED 204800 0 -

dc vol1_dco vol1
- - - BADLOG

v vol1_dcl gen
DETACHED 144 - DETACH

pl vol1_dcl-01 vol1_dcl
ENABLED 144 - ACTIVE

sd mydg03-01 vol1_dcl-01
ENABLED 144 0 -

pl vol1_dcl-02 vol1_dcl
DETACHED 144 - IOFAIL

sd mydg04-01 vol1_dcl-02
ENABLED 144 0 RELOCATE

sp SNAP-vol1_snp vol1
- - - -

This output shows the mirrored volume, vol1, its snapshot volume, SNAP-
vol1, and their respective DCOs, vol1_dco and SNAP-vol1_dco. The two
disks, mydg03 and mydg04, that hold the DCO plexes for the DCO volume,
26 Recovery from hardware failure
Recovery from failure of a DCO volume

vol1_dcl, of vol1 have failed. As a result, the DCO volume, vol1_dcl, of the
volume, vol1, has been detached and the state of vol1_dco has been set to
BADLOG. For future reference, note the entries for the snap objects, vol1_snp
and SNAP-vol1_snp, that point to vol1 and SNAP-vol1 respectively.
You can use such output to deduce the name of a volume’s DCO (in this example,
vol1_dco), or you can use the following vxprint command to display the name
of a volume’s DCO:
# vxprint [-g diskgroup] -F%dco_name volume
You can use the vxprint command to check if the badlog flag is set for the DCO
of a volume as shown here:
# vxprint [-g diskgroup] -F%badlog dco_name
This command returns the value on if the badlog flag is set. For the example
output, the command would take this form:
# vxprint -g mydg -F%badlog vol1_dco

on

Use the following command to verify the version number of the DCO:
# vxprint [-g diskgroup] -F%version dco_name
This returns a value of 0 or 20. For the example output, the command would take
this form:
# vxprint -g mydg -F%version vol1_dco

The DCO version number determines the recovery procedure that you should
use:
■ “Recovering a version 0 DCO” on page 27
■ “Recovering a version 20 DCO” on page 28
 Recovery from hardware failure 27
Recovery from failure of a DCO volume

Recovering a version 0 DCO

For a version 0 DCO, perform the following steps to recover the DCO volume:
1 Correct the problem that caused the I/O failure.
2 Use the following command to remove the badlog flag from the DCO:
# vxdco [-g diskgroup] -o force enable dco_name
For the example output, the command would take this form:
# vxdco -g mydg -o force enable vol1_dco
The entry for vol1_dco in the output from vxprint now looks like this:
dc vol1_dco vol1 - - - -
3 Restart the DCO volume using the following command:
# vxvol [-g diskgroup] start dco_log_vol
For the example output, the command would take this form:
# vxvol -g mydg start vol1_dcl
4 Use the vxassist snapclear command to clear the FastResync maps for the
original volume and for all its snapshots. This ensures that potentially stale
FastResync maps are not used when the snapshots are snapped back (a full
resynchronization is performed). FastResync tracking is re-enabled for any
subsequent snapshots of the volume.

Caution: You must use the vxassist snapclear command on all the
snapshots of the volume after removing the badlog flag from the DCO.
Otherwise, data may be lost or corrupted when the snapshots are snapped
back.

If a volume and its snapshot volume are in the same disk group, the
following command clears the FastResync maps for both volumes:
# vxassist [-g diskgroup] snapclear volume \
snap_obj_to_snapshot
Here snap_obj_to_snapshot is the name of the snap object associated with
volume that points to the snapshot volume.
For the example output, the command would take this form:
# vxassist -g mydg snapclear vol1 SNAP-vol1_snp

If a snapshot volume and the original volume are in different disk groups,
you must perform a separate snapclear operation on each volume:
# vxassist -g diskgroup1 snapclear volume snap_obj_to_snapshot
# vxassist -g diskgroup2 snapclear snapvol snap_obj_to_volume
Here snap_obj_to_volume is the name of the snap object associated with the
snapshot volume, snapvol, that points to the original volume.
For the example output, the commands would take this form if SNAP-vol1
had been moved to the disk group, snapdg:
# vxassist -g mydg snapclear vol1 SNAP-vol1_snp

# vxassist -g snapdg snapclear SNAP-vol1 vol1_snp

28 Recovery from hardware failure

Recovery from failure of a DCO volume

5 To snap back the snapshot volume on which you performed a snapclear in

the previous step, use the following command (after using the vxdg move
command to move the snapshot plex back to the original disk group, if
necessary):
# vxplex -f [-g diskgroup] snapback volume snapvol_plex
For the example output, the command would take this form:
# vxplex -f -g mydg snapback vol1 vol1-03

Note: You cannot use vxassist snapback because the snapclear operation
removes the snapshot association information.

Recovering a version 20 DCO

For a version 20 DCO, perform the following steps to recover the DCO volume:
1 Correct the problem that caused the I/O failure.
2 Use the vxsnap command to dissociate each full-sized instant snapshot
volume that is associated with the volume:
# vxsnap [-g diskgroup] dis snapvol
For the example output, the command would take this form:
# vxsnap -g mydg dis SNAP-vol1
3 Unprepare the volume using the following command:
# vxsnap [-g diskgroup] unprepare volume
For the example output, the command would take this form:
# vxsnap -g mydg unprepare vol1
4 Start the volume using the vxvol command:
# vxvol [-g diskgroup] start volume
For the example output, the command would take this form:
# vxvol -g mydg start vol1
5 Prepare the volume again using the following command:
# vxsnap [-g diskgroup] prepare volume [ndcomirs=number] \
[regionsize=size] [drl=yes|no|sequential] \
[storage_attribute ...]
For the example output, the command might take this form:
# vxsnap -g mydg prepare vol1 ndcomirs=2 drl=yes

This adds a DCO volume with 2 plexes, and also enables DRL and
FastResync (if licensed).
See the Veritas Volume Manager Administrator’s Guide and the vxsnap(1M)
manual page for full details of how to use the vxsnap prepare command.
 Chapter 2
Recovery from failure of
instant snapshot
operations
This chapter describes how to recover from various failure and error conditions
that may occur during instant snapshot operations:
■ Failure of vxsnap prepare
■ Failure of vxsnap make for full-sized instant snapshots
■ Failure of vxsnap make for break-off instant snapshots
■ Failure of vxsnap make for space-optimized instant snapshots
■ Failure of vxsnap restore
■ Failure of vxsnap reattach or refresh
■ Copy-on-write failure
■ I/O errors during resynchronization
■ I/O failure on a DCO volume
See the Veritas Volume Manager Administrator’s Guide and the vxsnap(1M)
manual page for full details of the creation and administration of instant
snapshots.
30 Recovery from failure of instant snapshot operations
Failure of vxsnap prepare

Failure of vxsnap prepare

If a vxsnap prepare operation fails prematurely, the vxprint command may
show the new DCO volume in the INSTSNAPTMP state. VxVM can usually
recover the DCO volume without intervention. However, in certain situations,
this recovery may not succeed. If this happens, use the following command to
delete the DCO volume:
# vxedit [-g diskgroup] rm DCO_volume
Alternatively, the DCO volume is removed automatically when the system is
next restarted. When the DCO volume has been removed, run the vxsnap
prepare command again.

Failure of vxsnap make for full-sized instant

snapshots
If a vxsnap make operation fails during the creation of a full-sized instant
snapshot, the snapshot volume may go into the DISABLED state, be marked
invalid and be rendered unstartable. You can use the following command to
check that the inst_invalid flag is set to on:
# vxprint [-g diskgroup] -F%inst_invalid snapshot_volume
VxVM can usually recover the snapshot volume without intervention. However,
in certain situations, this recovery may not succeed. If this happens, use the
following steps to delete the DCO volume:
1 Use the vxmend command to clear the snapshot volume’s tutil0 field:
# vxmend [-g diskgroup] clear tutil0 snapshot_volume
2 Run the following command on the snapshot volume:
# vxsnap [-g diskgroup] unprepare snapshot_volume
3 Prepare the snapshot volume again for snapshot operations:
# vxsnap [-g diskgroup] prepare snapshot_volume
 Recovery from failure of instant snapshot operations 31
Failure of vxsnap make for break-off instant snapshots

Failure of vxsnap make for break-off instant

snapshots
If a vxsnap make operation fails during the creation of a third-mirror break-off
instant snapshot, the snapshot volume may go into the INSTSNAPTMP state.
VxVM can usually recover the snapshot volume without intervention. However,
in certain situations, this recovery may not succeed. If this happens, use the
following command to delete the snapshot volume:
# vxedit [-g diskgroup] rm snapshot_volume
Alternatively, the snapshot volume is removed automatically when the system
is next restarted.

Failure of vxsnap make for space-optimized instant

snapshots
If a vxsnap make operation fails during the creation of a space-optimized instant
snapshot, the snapshot volume may go into the INSTSNAPTMP state. VxVM can
usually recover the snapshot volume without intervention. However, in certain
situations, this recovery may not succeed. If this happens, use the following
command to delete the snapshot volume:
# vxedit [-g diskgroup] rm snapshot_volume
Alternatively, the snapshot volume is removed automatically when the system
is next restarted.
If the vxsnap make operation was being performed on a prepared cache object by
specifying the cache attribute, the cache object remains intact after deleting
the snapshot. If the cachesize attribute was used to specify a new cache object,
the cache object does not exist after deleting the snapshot.

Failure of vxsnap restore

If a vxsnap restore operation fails, the volume being restored may go into the
DISABLED state. Use the following command to start the volume:
# vxvol [-g diskgroup] start volume
32 Recovery from failure of instant snapshot operations
Failure of vxsnap reattach or refresh

Failure of vxsnap reattach or refresh

If a vxsnap reattach or refresh operation fails, the volume being refreshed may
go into the DISABLED state, be marked invalid and be rendered unstartable. You
can use the following command to check that the inst_invalid flag is set to
on:
# vxprint [-g diskgroup] -F%inst_invalid volume
Use the following steps to recover the volume:
1 Use the vxmend command to clear the volume’s tutil0 field:
# vxmend [-g diskgroup] clear tutil0 volume
2 Use the vxsnap command to dissociate the volume from the snapshot
hierarchy:
# vxsnap [-g diskgroup] dis volume
3 Use the following command to start the volume:
# vxvol [-g diskgroup] start volume
4 Re-run the failed reattach or refresh command.

Note: This results in a full resynchronization of the volume. Alternatively,

remove the snapshot volume and recreate it if required.

Copy-on-write failure
If an error is encountered while performing an internal resynchronization of a
volume’s snapshot, the snapshot volume goes into the INVALID state, and is
made inaccessible for I/O and instant snapshot operations.
Use the following steps to recover the snapshot volume:
1 Use the vxsnap command to dissociate the volume from the snapshot
hierarchy:
# vxsnap [-g diskgroup] dis snapshot_volume
2 Unprepare the volume using the following command:
# vxsnap [-g diskgroup] unprepare snapshot_volume
3 Prepare the volume using the following command:
# vxsnap [-g diskgroup] prepare volume [ndcomirs=number] \
[regionsize=size] [drl=yes|no|sequential] \
[storage_attribute ...]
See the Veritas Volume Manager Administrator’s Guide and the vxsnap(1M)
manual page for full details of how to use the vxsnap prepare command.
The volume can now be used again for snapshot operations.
Alternatively, you can remove the snapshot volume and recreate it if required.
 Recovery from failure of instant snapshot operations 33
I/O errors during resynchronization

I/O errors during resynchronization

Snapshot resynchronization (started by vxsnap syncstart, or by specifying
sync=on to vxsnap) stops if an I/O error occurs, and displays the following
message on the system console:
VxVM vxsnap ERROR V-5-1-6840 Synchronization of the
volume volume stopped due to I/O error
After correcting the source of the error, use the following command to restart
the resynchronization operation:
# vxsnap [-b] [-g diskgroup] syncstart volume
See the Veritas Volume Manager Administrator’s Guide and the vxsnap(1M)
manual page for full details of how to use the vxsnap syncstart command.

I/O failure on a DCO volume

If an I/O failure occurs on a DCO volume, its FastResync maps and DRL log
cannot be accessed, and the DCO volume is marked with the BADLOG flag. DRL
logging and recovery, and instant snapshot operations are not possible with the
volume until you recover its DCO volume using the procedure described in
“Recovering a version 20 DCO” on page 28.

Note: If the I/O failure also affects the data volume, it must be recovered before
its DCO volume can be recovered.
34 Recovery from failure of instant snapshot operations
I/O failure on a DCO volume
 Chapter 3
Recovery from boot disk
failure
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 the failure of the boot (root) disk. It also includes
procedures for repairing the root (/) and usr file systems.
For information about recovering volumes and their data on non-boot disks, see
“Recovery from hardware failure” on page 7.
For more information about protecting your system, see the Veritas Volume
Manager Installation Guide.

Note: The examples in this chapter assume that the boot (root) disk is configured
on the device c0t0d0s2. Your system may be configured to use a different
device.

Possible root, swap, and usr configurations

During installation, it is possible to set up a variety of configurations for the
root (/) and usr file systems, and for swap. The following cases are possible:
■ usr is a directory under / and no separate partition is allocated for it. In this
case, usr becomes part of the rootvol volume when the root disk is
encapsulated and put under Veritas Volume Manager control.
■ usr is on a separate partition from the root partition on the root disk . In
this case, a separate volume is created for the usr partition. vxmirror
mirrors the usr volume on the destination disk.
36 Recovery from boot disk failure
Booting from alternate boot disks

■ usr is on a disk other than the root disk. In this case, a volume is created for
the usr partition only if you use VxVM to encapsulate the disk. Note that
encapsulating the root disk and having mirrors of the root volume is
ineffective in maintaining the availability of your system if the separate usr
partition becomes inaccessible for any reason. For maximum availablility of
the system, it is recommended that you encapsulate both the root disk and
the disk containing the usr partition, and have mirrors for the usr,
rootvol, and swapvol volumes.
The rootvol volume must exist in the boot disk group. See “Boot-time Volume
Restrictions” in the “Administering Disks” chapter of the Veritas Volume
Manager Administrator’s Guide for information on rootvol and usr volume
restrictions.
VxVM allows you to put swap partitions on any disk; it does not need an initial
swap area during early phases of the boot process. By default, the Veritas
Volume Manager installation chooses partition 0 on the selected root disk as the
root partition, and partition 1 as the swap partition. However, it is possible to
have the swap partition on a partition not located on the root disk. In such cases,
you are advised to encapsulate that disk and create mirrors for the swap
volume. If you do not do this, damage to the swap partition eventually causes
the system to crash. It may be possible to boot the system, but having mirrors
for the swapvol volume prevents system failures.

Booting from alternate boot disks

If the root disk is encapsulated and mirrored, you can use one of its mirrors to
boot the system if the primary boot disk fails. To boot the system after failure of
the primary boot disk on a Sun SPARCR system, follow these steps:
1 Check that the EEPROM variable use-nvramrc? is set to true by entering
the following command at the boot prompt:
ok printenv use-nvramrc?

If set to true, this variable allows the use of alternate boot disks. To set the
value of use-nvramrc? to true, enter the following command at the boot
prompt:
ok setenv use-nvramrc? true

If use-nvramrc? is set to false, the system fails to boot from the

devalias and displays an error message such as the following:
Rebooting with command: boot vx-mirdisk

Boot device: /pci@1f,4000/scsi@3/disk@0,0 File and args:vx­

mirdisk

boot: cannot open vx-mirdisk

Enter filename [vx-mirdisk]:

 Recovery from boot disk failure 37

The boot process on SPARC systems

2 Check for available boot disk aliases using the following command at the
boot prompt:
ok devalias
Suitable mirrors of the root disk are listed with names of the form vx­
diskname.
3 Enter this command:
ok boot alias
where alias is the name of an alternate root mirror found from the previous
step.
If a selected disk contains a root mirror that is stale, vxconfigd displays an
error stating that the mirror is unusable and lists any non-stale alternate
bootable disks.
More information about the boot process may be found in “The boot process on
SPARC systems” on page 37.

The boot process on SPARC systems

A Sun SPARCR system prompts for a boot command unless the autoboot flag
has been set in the nonvolatile storage area used by the firmware. Machines
with older PROMs have different prompts than that for the newer V2 and V3
versions. These newer versions of PROM are also known as OpenBoot PROMs
(OBP). The boot command syntax for the newer types of PROMs is:
ok boot [OBP names] [filename] [boot-flags]
OBP names specify the OpenBoot PROM designations. For example, on Desktop
SPARC systems, the designation sbus/esp@0,800000/sd@3,0:a indicates a
SCSI disk (sd) at target 3, lun 0 on the SCSI bus, with the esp host bus adapter
plugged into slot 0.

Note: You can use Veritas Volume Manager boot disk alias names instead of OBP
names. Example aliases are vx-rootdisk or vx-disk01. To list the available
boot devices, use the devalias command at the OpenBoot prompt.

filename is the name of a file that contains the kernel. The default is /kernel/
unix in the root partition. If necessary, you can specify another program (such
as /stand/diag) by specifying the -a flag. (Some versions of the firmware
allow the default filename to be saved in the nonvolatile storage area of the
system.)
38 Recovery from boot disk failure
Hot-relocation and boot disk failure

Note: Do not boot a system running VxVM with rootability enabled using all the
defaults presented by the -a flag. See “Restoring a copy of /etc/system on the
root disk” on page 44 for the correct responses.

Boot flags are not interpreted by the boot program. The boot program passes
all boot-flags to the file identified by filename. See the kernel (1) and kadb (1M)
manual pages for information on the options available with the default
standalone program, /kernel/unix.

Hot-relocation and boot disk failure

If the boot (root) disk fails and it is mirrored, hot-relocation automatically
attempts to replace the failed root disk mirror with a new mirror. To achieve
this, hot-relocation uses a surviving mirror of the root disk to create a new
mirror, either on a spare disk, or on a disk with sufficient free space. This
ensures that there are always at least two mirrors of the root disk that can be
used for booting. The hot-relocation daemon also calls the vxbootsetup utility
to configure the disk with the new mirror as a bootable disk.
Hot-relocation can fail for a root disk if the boot disk group does not contain
sufficient spare or free space to fit the volumes from the failed root disk. The
rootvol and swapvol volumes require contiguous disk space. If the root
volume and other volumes on the failed root disk cannot be relocated to the
same new disk, each of these volumes may be relocated to different disks.
Mirrors of rootvol and swapvol volumes must be cylinder-aligned. This
means that they can only be created on disks that have enough space to allow
their subdisks to begin and end on cylinder boundaries. Hot-relocation fails to
create the mirrors if these disks are not available.

Unrelocating subdisks to a replacement boot disk

When a boot disk is encapsulated, the root file system and other system areas,
such as the swap partition, are made into volumes. VxVM creates a private
region using part of the existing swap area, which is usually located in the
middle of the disk. However, when a disk is initialized as a VM disk, VxVM
creates the private region at the beginning of the disk.
If a mirrored encapsulated boot disk fails, hot-relocation creates new copies of
its subdisks on a spare disk. The name of the disk that failed and the offsets of its
component subdisks are stored in the subdisk records as part of this process.
After the failed boot disk is replaced with one that has the same storage
capacity, it is “initialized” and added back to the disk group. vxunreloc can be
run to move all the subdisks back to the disk. However, the difference of the disk
 Recovery from boot disk failure 39
Recovery from boot failure

layout between an initialized disk and an encapsulated disk affects the way the
offset into a disk is calculated for each unrelocated subdisk. Use the -f option to
vxunreloc to move the subdisks to the disk, but not to the same offsets. For this
to be successful, the replacement disk should be at least 2 megabytes larger than
the original boot disk.
vxunreloc makes the new disk bootable after it moves all the subdisks to the
disk.

Note: The system dump device is usually configured to be the swap partition of
the root disk. Whenever a swap subdisk is moved (by hot-relocation, or using
vxunreloc) from one disk to another, the dump device must be re-configured on
the new disk.

You can use the dumpadm command to view and set the dump device. For details,
see the dumpadm(1M) manual page.

Recovery from boot failure

While there are many types of failures that can prevent a system from booting,
the same basic procedure can be taken to bring the system up. When a system
fails to boot, you should first try to identify the failure by the evidence left
behind on the screen and then attempt to repair the problem (for example, by
turning on a drive that was accidentally powered off). If the problem is one that
cannot be repaired (such as data errors on the boot disk), boot the system from
an alternate boot disk that contains a mirror of the root volume, so that the
damage can be repaired or the failing disk can be replaced.
The following sections outline some possible failures and provide instructions
on the corrective actions:
■ “Boot device cannot be opened” on page 39
■ “Cannot boot from unusable or stale plexes” on page 40
■ “Invalid UNIX partition” on page 41
■ “Incorrect entries in /etc/vfstab” on page 42
■ “Missing or damaged configuration files” on page 43

Boot device cannot be opened

Early in the boot process, immediately following system initialization, there
may be messages similar to the following:
SCSI device 0,0 is not responding

Can’t open boot device

40 Recovery from boot disk failure

Recovery from boot failure

This means that the system PROM was unable to read the boot program from
the boot drive. Common causes for this problem are:
■ The boot disk is not powered on.
■ The SCSI bus is not terminated.
■ There is a controller failure of some sort.
■ A disk is failing and locking the bus, preventing any disks from identifying
themselves to the controller, and making the controller assume that there
are no disks attached.
The first step in diagnosing this problem is to check carefully that everything on
the SCSI bus is in order. If disks are powered off or the bus is unterminated,
correct the problem and reboot the system. If one of the disks has failed, remove
the disk from the bus and replace it.
If no hardware problems are found, the error is probably due to data errors on
the boot disk. In order to repair this problem, attempt to boot the system from
an alternate boot disk (containing a mirror of the root volume). If you are unable
to boot from an alternate boot disk, there is still some type of hardware problem.
Similarly, if switching the failed boot disk with an alternate boot disk fails to
allow the system to boot, this also indicates hardware problems.

Cannot boot from unusable or stale plexes

If a disk is unavailable when the system is running, any mirrors of volumes that
reside on that disk become stale. This means that the data on that disk is
inconsistent relative to the other mirrors of that volume. During the boot
process, the system accesses only one copy of the root volume (the copy on the
boot disk) until a complete configuration for this volume can be obtained.
If it turns out that the plex of this volume that was used for booting is stale, the
system must be rebooted from an alternate boot disk that contains non-stale
plexes. This problem can occur, for example, if the system was booted from one
of the disks made bootable by VxVM with the original boot disk turned off. The
system boots normally, but the plexes that reside on the unpowered disk are
stale. If the system reboots from the original boot disk with the disk turned back
on, the system boots using that stale plex.
Another possible problem can occur if errors in the Veritas Volume Manager
headers on the boot disk prevent VxVM from properly identifying the disk. In
this case, VxVM does not know the name of that disk. This is a problem because
plexes are associated with disk names, so any plexes on the unidentified disk are
unusable.
A problem can also occur if the root disk has a failure that affects the root
volume plex. At the next boot attempt, the system still expects to use the failed
 Recovery from boot disk failure 41
Recovery from boot failure

root plex for booting. If the root disk was mirrored at the time of the failure, an
alternate root disk (with a valid root plex) can be specified for booting.
If any of these situations occur, the configuration daemon, vxconfigd, notes it
when it is configuring the system as part of the init processing of the boot
sequence. vxconfigd displays a message describing the error and what can be
done about it, and then halts the system. For example, if the plex rootvol-01
of the root volume rootvol on disk rootdisk is stale, vxconfigd may display
this message:
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-1049: System boot disk does not have
a valid root plex
Please boot from one of the following disks:
Disk: disk01 Device: c0t1d0s2
vxvm:vxconfigd: Error: System startup failed
The system is down.
This informs the administrator that the alternate boot disk named disk01
contains a usable copy of the root plex and should be used for booting. When
this message is displayed, reboot the system from the alternate boot disk as
described in “Booting from alternate boot disks” on page 36.
Once the system has booted, the exact problem needs to be determined. If the
plexes on the boot disk were simply stale, they are caught up automatically as
the system comes up. If, on the other hand, there was a problem with the private
area on the disk or the disk failed, you need to re-add or replace the disk.
If the plexes on the boot disk are unavailable, you should receive mail from
Veritas Volume Manager utilities describing the problem. Another way to
determine the problem is by listing the disks with the vxdisk utility. In the
above example, if the problem is a failure in the private area of root disk (such as
due to media failures or accidentally overwriting the Veritas Volume Manager
private region on the disk), vxdisk list shows this display:
DEVICE TYPE DISK GROUP STATUS

- - rootdisk bootdg failed was: c0t3d0s2

c0t1d0s2 sliced disk01 bootdg ONLINE

Invalid UNIX partition

Once the boot program has loaded, it attempts to access the boot disk through
the normal UNIX partition information. If this information is damaged, the boot
program fails with an error such as:
File just loaded does not appear to be executable
42 Recovery from boot disk failure
Recovery from boot failure

If this message appears during the boot attempt, the system should be booted
from an alternate boot disk. While booting, most disk drivers display errors on
the console about the invalid UNIX partition information on the failing disk. The
messages are similar to this:
WARNING: unable to read label
WARNING: corrupt label_sdo

This indicates that the failure was due to an invalid disk partition. You can
attempt to re-add the disk as described in “Re-adding a failed boot disk” on
page 49. However, if the reattach fails, then the disk needs to be replaced as
described in “Replacing a failed boot disk” on page 50.

Incorrect entries in /etc/vfstab

When the root disk is encapsulated and put under Veritas Volume Manager
control, as part of the normal encapsulation process, volumes are created for all
of the partitions on the disk. VxVM modifies the /etc/vfstab to use the
corresponding volumes instead of the disk partitions. Care should be taken
while editing the /etc/vfstab file manually, and you should always make a
backup copy before committing any changes to it. The most important entries
are those corresponding to / and /usr. The vfstab that existed prior to Veritas
Volume Manager installation is saved in /etc/vfstab.prevm.

Damaged root (/) entry in /etc/vfstab

If the entry in /etc/vfstab for the root file system (/) is lost or is incorrect,
the system boots in single-user mode. Messages similar to the following are
displayed on booting the system:
INIT: Cannot create /var/adm/utmp or /var/adm/utmpx
INIT: failed write of utmpx entry:" "
It is recommended that you first run fsck on the root partition as shown in this
example:
# fsck -F ufs /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0

At this point in the boot process, / is mounted read-only, not read/write. Since
the entry in /etc/vfstab was either incorrect or deleted, mount / as read/
write manually, using this command:
# mount -o remount /dev/vx/dsk/rootvol /

After mounting / as read/write, exit the shell. The system prompts for a new run
level. For multi-user mode, enter run level 3:
ENTER RUN LEVEL (0-6,s or S): 3

Restore the entry in /etc/vfstab for / after the system boots.

 Recovery from boot disk failure 43
Recovery from boot failure

Damaged /usr entry in /etc/vfstab

The /etc/vfstab file has an entry for /usr only if /usr is located on a
separate disk partition. After encapsulation of the disk containing the /usr
partition, VxVM changes the entry in /etc/vfstab to use the corresponding
volume.
In the event of loss of the entry for /usr from /etc/vfstab, the system cannot
be booted (even if you have mirrors of the /usr volume). In this case, boot the
system from the CD-ROM and restore /etc/vfstab using the following
procedure:
1 Boot the operating system into single-user mode from its installation CD-
ROM using the following command at the boot prompt:
ok boot cdrom -s
2 Mount/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 on a suitable mount point such as /a or /mnt:
# mount /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 /a
3 Edit /a/etc/vfstab, and ensure that there is an entry for the /usr file
system, such as the following:
/dev/vx/dsk/usr /dev/vx/rdsk/usr /usr ufs 1 yes -

4 Shut down and reboot the system from the same root partition on which
the vfstab file was restored.

Missing or damaged configuration files

Note: VxVM no longer maintains entries for tunables in /etc/system as was

the case for VxVM 3.2 and earlier releases. All entries for Veritas Volume
Manager device driver tunables are now contained in files named /kernel/
drv/vx*.conf, such as /kernel/drv/vxio.conf. For more information, see
the “Performance Monitoring and Tuning” chapter of the Veritas Volume
Manager Administrator’s Guide.

Caution: If you need to modify configuration files such as /etc/system, make a

copy of the file in the root file system before editing it.

If your changes to the /etc/system file are incorrect, the saved copy can be
specified to the boot program. To specify the saved system file to the boot
program, follow the procedure in the next section.
44 Recovery from boot disk failure
Recovery from boot failure

Restoring a copy of /etc/system on the root disk

If the /etc/system file is damaged and a saved copy of the /etc/system file
is available, the system can be booted as follows:
1 Boot the system with the following command:
ok boot -a
2 Press Return to accept the default for all prompts except the following:
■ The default pathname for the kernel program, /kernel/unix, may
not be appropriate for your system’s architecture. If this is so, enter the
correct pathname, such as /platform/sun4u/kernel/unix, at the
following prompt:
Enter filename [/kernel/unix]:/platform/sun4u/kernel/unix

■ Enter the name of the saved system file, such as /etc/system.save

at the following prompt:
Name of system file [/etc/system]:/etc/system.save
■ Enter /pseudo/vxio@0:0 as the physical name of the root device at
the following prompt:
Enter physical name of root device

[...]:/pseudo/vxio@0:0

Copy of /etc/system is not available on the root disk

If /etc/system is damaged or missing, and a saved copy of this file is not
available on the root disk, the system cannot be booted with the Veritas Volume
Manager rootability feature turned on.
The following procedure assumes the device name of the root disk to be
c0t0d0s2, and that the root (/) file system is on partition s0.
To boot the system without Veritas Volume Manager rootability and restore the
configuration files:
1 Boot the operating system into single-user mode from its installation CD-
ROM using the following command at the boot prompt:
ok boot cdrom -s
2 Mount/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 on a suitable mount point such as /a or /mnt:
# mount /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 /a
3 If a backup copy of/etc/system is available, restore this as the file /a/
etc/system. If a backup copy is not available, create a new /a/etc/
system file. Ensure that /a/etc/system contains the following entries
that are required by VxVM:
set vxio:vol_rootdev_is_volume=1

forceload: drv/driver

...

forceload: drv/vxio

 Recovery from boot disk failure 45

Repairing root or /usr file systems on mirrored volumes

forceload: drv/vxspec

forceload: drv/vxdmp

rootdev:/pseudo/vxio@0:0

Lines of the form forceload: drv/driver are used to forcibly load the
drivers that are required for the root mirror disks. Example driver names
are pci, sd, ssd, dad and ide. To find out the names of the drivers, use the
ls command to obtain a long listing of the special files that correspond to
the devices used for the root disk, for example:
# ls -al /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s2
This produces output similar to the following (with irrelevant detail
removed):
lrwxrwxrwx ... /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s2 ->

../../devices/pci@1f,0/pci@1/pci@1/SUNW,isptwo@4/sd@0,0:c

This example would require lines to force load both the pci and the sd
drivers:
forceload: drv/pci

forceload: drv/sd

4 Shut down and reboot the system from the same root partition on which
the configuration files were restored.

Repairing root or /usr file systems on mirrored

volumes
If the root or /usr file system is defined on a mirrored volume, errors in the
partition that underlies one of the mirrors can result in data corruption or
system errors at boot time (when VxVM is started and assumes that the mirrors
are synchronized).
Two alternate workarounds exist for this situation:
■ Mount one plex of the root or /usr file system, repair it, unmount it, and
use dd to copy the fixed plex to all other plexes. This procedure is not
recommended as it can be error prone.
■ Restore the system from a valid backup tape. This procedure is described in
the following section. It does not require the operating system to be re-
installed from the base CD-ROM. It provides a simple, efficient, and reliable
means of recovery when both the root disk and its mirror are damaged.
46 Recovery from boot disk failure
Repairing root or /usr file systems on mirrored volumes

Recovering a root disk and root mirror from backup tape

This procedure assumes that you have:
■ A listing of the partition table for the original root disk before you
encapsulated it.
■ A current full backup of all the file systems on the original root disk that was
under Veritas Volume Manager control. If the root file system is of type
ufs, you can back it up using the ufsdump command. See the ufsdump(1M)
manual page for more information.
■ A new boot disk installed to replace the original failed boot disk if the
original boot disk was physically damaged.
This procedure requires the reinstallation of the root disk. To prevent the loss of
data on disks not involved in the reinstallation, only involve the root disk in the
reinstallation procedure.
Several of the automatic options for installation access disks other than the root
disk without requiring confirmation from the administrator. Therefore,
disconnect all other disks containing volumes from the system prior to starting
this procedure. This will ensure that these disks are unaffected by the
reinstallation. Reconnect the disks after completing the procedure.
The following procedure assumes the device name of the new root disk to be
c0t0d0s2, and that you need to recover both the root (/) file system on
partition s0, and the /usr file system on partition s6. If your system does not
have a separate /usr file system, omit steps 7 and 8.
1 Boot the operating system into single-user mode from its installation CD-
ROM using the following command at the boot prompt:
ok boot cdrom -s
2 Use the format command to create partitions on the new root disk
(c0t0d0s2). These should be identical in size to those on the original root
disk before encapsulation unless you are using this procedure to change
their sizes. If you change the size of the partitions, ensure that they are large
enough to store the data that is restored to them. See the format(1M)
manual page for more information.

Note: A maximum of five partitions may be created for file systems or swap
areas as encapsulation reserves two partitions for Veritas Volume Manager
private and public regions.
 Recovery from boot disk failure 47
Repairing root or /usr file systems on mirrored volumes

3 Use the mkfs command to make new file systems on the root and usr
partitions that you created in the previous step. For example, to make a ufs
file system on the root partition, enter:
# mkfs -F ufs /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0
See the mkfs(1M) and mkfs_ufs(1M) manual pages for more information.
4 Mount/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 on a suitable mount point such as /a or /mnt:
# mount /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 /a
5 Restore the root file system from tape into the /a directory hierarchy. For
example, if you used ufsdump to back up the file system, use the ufsrestore
command to restore it. See the ufsrestore(1M) manual page for more
information.
6 Use the installboot command to install a bootblock device on /a.
7 Use the mkdir command to create a suitable mount point, such as /a/usr/,
and mount /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s6 on it:
# mkdir -p /a/usr

# mount /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s6 /a/usr

8 Restore the /usr file system from tape into the /a/usr directory hierarchy.
9 Disable startup of VxVM by modifying files in the restored root file system.
10 Create the file /a/etc/vx/reconfig.d/state.d/install-db to
prevent the configuration daemon, vxconfigd, from starting:
# touch /a/etc/vx/reconfig.d/state.d/install-db
11 Copy /a/etc/system to a backup file such as /a/etc/system.old.
12 Comment out the following lines from /a/etc/system by putting a *
character in front of them:
set vxio:vol_rootdev_is_volume=1
rootdev:/pseudo/vxio@0:0
These lines should then read:
* set vxio:vol_rootdev_is_volume=1

* rootdev:/pseudo/vxio@0:0

13 Copy /a/etc/vfstab to a backup file such as /a/etc/vfstab.old.

14 Edit /a/etc/vfstab, and replace the volume device names (beginning
with /dev/vx/dsk) for the / and /usr file system entries with their
standard disk devices, /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 and /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s6.
For example, replace the following lines:
/dev/vx/dsk/rootvol /dev/vx/rdsk/rootvol / ufs 1 no ­
/dev/vx/dsk/usrvol /dev/vx/rdsk/usrvol /usr ufs 1 yes -
with this line:
/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s0 / ufs 1 no ­

/dev/dsk/c0t0d0s6 /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0s6 /usr ufs 1 yes -

48 Recovery from boot disk failure

Repairing root or /usr file systems on mirrored volumes

15 Remove /a/dev/vx/dsk/bootdg and /a/dev/vx/rdsk/bootdg:

# rm /a/dev/vx/dsk/bootdg

# rm /a/dev/vx/rdsk/bootdg

16 Shut down the system cleanly using the init 0 command, and reboot from
the new root disk. The system comes up thinking that VxVM is not installed.
17 The next steps in the procedure depend on whether there are root disk
mirrors in the old boot disk group:
■ If there are only root disk mirrors in the old boot disk group, remove
any volumes that were associated with the encapsulated root disk (for
example, rootvol, swapvol and usrvol) from the /dev/vx/dsk/
bootdg and /dev/vx/rdsk/bootdg directories.
■ If there are other disks in the old boot disk group that are not used as
root disk mirrors, remove files involved with the installation that are
no longer needed:
# rm -r /etc/vx/reconfig.d/state.d/install-db
Start the Veritas Volume Manager I/O daemons:
# vxiod set 10
Start the Veritas Volume Manager configuration daemon in disabled
mode:
# vxconfigd -m disable
Initialize the volboot file:
# vxdctl init
Enable the old boot disk group excluding the root disk that VxVM
interprets as failed::
# vxdctl enable
Use the vxedit command (or the Veritas Enterprise Administrator
(VEA)) to remove the old root disk volumes and the root disk itself from
Veritas Volume Manager control.
18 Use the vxdiskadm command to encapsulate the new root disk and
initialize any disks that are to serve as root disk mirrors. After the required
reboot, mirror the root disk onto the root disk mirrors.
 Recovery from boot disk failure 49
Re-adding and replacing boot disks

Re-adding and replacing boot disks

Data that is not critical for booting the system is only accessed by VxVM after
the system is fully operational, so it does not have to be located in specific areas.
VxVM can find it. However, boot-critical data must be placed in specific areas on
the bootable disks for the boot process to find it.
On some systems, the controller-specific actions performed by the disk
controller in the process and the system BIOS constrain the location of this
critical data.
If a boot disk fails, one of the following procedures can be used to correct the
problem:
■ If the errors are transient or correctable, re-use the same disk. This is known
as re-adding a disk. In some cases, reformatting a failed disk or performing a
surface analysis to rebuild the alternate-sector mappings are sufficient to
make a disk usable for re-addition.
■ If the disk has failed completely, replace it.
The following sections describe how to re-add or replace a failed boot disk.

Re-adding a failed boot disk

Re-adding a disk is the same procedure as replacing the disk, except that the
same physical disk is used. Normally, a disk that needs to be re-added has been
detached. This means that VxVM has detected the disk failure and has ceased to
access the disk.

Note: Your system may use a device name or path that differs from the examples.
See “Disk Devices” in the “Administering Disks” chapter of the Veritas Volume
Manager Administrator’s Guide for more information on device names.

For example, consider a system that has two disks, disk01 and disk02, which
are normally mapped into the system configuration during boot as disks
c0t0d0s2 and c0t1d0s2, respectively. A failure has caused disk01 to become
detached. This can be confirmed by listing the disks with the vxdisk utility
with this command:
# vxdisk list

vxdisk displays this (example) list:

DEVICE TYPE DISK GROUP STATUS

c0t0d0s2 sliced - - error

c0t1d0s2 sliced disk02 bootdg online

- - disk01 bootdg failed was:c0t0d0s2

50 Recovery from boot disk failure

Re-adding and replacing boot disks

Note that the disk disk01 has no device associated with it, and has a status of
failed with an indication of the device that it was detached from. It is also
possible for the device (such as c0t0d0s2 in the example) not to be listed at all
should the disk fail completely.
In some cases, the vxdisk list output can differ. For example, if the boot disk
has uncorrectable failures associated with the UNIX partition table, a missing
root partition cannot be corrected but there are no errors in the Veritas Volume
Manager private area. The vxdisk list command displays a listing such as this:
DEVICE TYPE DISK GROUP STATUS

c0t0d0s2 sliced disk01 bootdg online

c0t1d0s2 sliced disk02 bootdg online

However, because the error was not correctable, the disk is viewed as failed. In
such a case, remove the association between the failing device and its disk name
using the vxdiskadm “Remove a disk for replacement” menu item. (See the
vxdiskadm (1M) manual page for more information.) You can then perform any
special procedures to correct the problem, such as reformatting the device.
To re-add the disk, select the vxdiskadm “Replace a failed or removed disk”
menu item to replace the disk, and specify the same device as the replacement.
For the example above, you would replace disk01 with the device c0t0d0s2.
If hot-relocation is enabled when a mirrored boot disk fails, an attempt is made
to create a new mirror and remove the failed subdisks from the failing boot disk.
If a re-add succeeds after a successful hot-relocation, the root and other
volumes affected by the disk failure no longer exist on the re-added disk. Run
vxunreloc to move the hot-relocated subdisks back to the newly replaced disk.

Replacing a failed boot disk

The replacement disk must have at least as much storage capacity as was in use
on the disk being replaced. It must be large enough to accommodate all subdisks
of the original disk at their current disk offsets.
To estimate the size of the replacement disk, use this command:
# vxprint [-g diskgroup] -st -e ’sd_disk=”diskname”’

where diskname is the name of the disk that failed or of one of its mirrors.
The following is sample output from running this command:

# vxprint -g rtdg -st -e 'sd_disk="rtdg01"'

Disk group: rtdg

SD NAME PLEX DISK DISKOFFS LENGTH [COL/]OFF DEVICE MODE

...

sd rtdg01-01 swapvol-01 rtdg01 0 1045296 0 c0t0d0 ENA

sd rtdg01-02 rootvol-01 rtdg01 1045296 16751952 0 c0t0d0 ENA

 Recovery from boot disk failure 51

Re-adding and replacing boot disks

From the resulting output, add the DISKOFFS and LENGTH values for the last
subdisk listed for the disk. This size is in 512-byte sectors. Divide this number by
2 for the size in kilobytes. In this example, the DISKOFFS and LENGTH values for
the subdisk rtdg01-02 are 1,045,296 and 16,751,952, so the disk size is
(1,045,296 + 16,751,952)/2, which equals 8,898,624 kilobytes or approximately
8.5 gigabytes.

Note: Disk sizes reported by manufacturers usually represent the unformatted

capacity of disks. Also, most manufacturers use the terms megabyte and gigabyte
to mean a million (1,000,000) and a billion (1,000,000,000) bytes respectively,
rather than the usual meaning of 1,048,576 and1,073,741,824 bytes. For the
above example, the actual size for the disk as quoted by the manufacturer was
9.6 gigabytes.

To replace a boot disk:

1 Boot the system from an alternate boot disk (see “Booting from alternate
boot disks” on page 36).
2 Remove the association between the failing device and its disk name using
the “Remove a disk for replacement” function of vxdiskadm. (See the
vxdiskadm (1M) manual page for more information.)
3 Shut down the system and replace the failed hardware.
4 After rebooting from the alternate boot disk, use the vxdiskadm “Replace a
failed or removed disk” menu item to notify VxVM that you have replaced
the failed disk.

Caution: If the replacement disk was previously an encapsulated root disk

under VxVM control, select to reorganize the disk when prompted.
Otherwise, the disk is left with an invalid VTOC that renders the system
unbootable. Ensure that you have made at least one valid copy of any
existing data on the disk.

5 Use vxdiskadm to mirror the alternate boot disk to the replacement boot
disk.
6 When the volumes on the boot disk have been restored, shut down the
system, and test that the system can be booted from the replacement boot
disk.
52 Recovery from boot disk failure
Recovery by reinstallation

Recovery by reinstallation
Reinstallation is necessary if all copies of your boot (root) disk are damaged, or
if certain critical files are lost due to file system damage.
If these types of failures occur, attempt to preserve as much of the original
VxVM configuration as possible. Any volumes that are not directly involved in
the failure do not need to be reconfigured. You do not have to reconfigure any
volumes that are preserved.

General reinstallation information

This section describes procedures used to reinstall VxVM and preserve as much
of the original configuration as possible after a failure.

Note: System reinstallation destroys the contents of any disks that are used for
reinstallation.

All VxVM-related information is removed during reinstallation. Data removed

includes data in private areas on removed disks that contain the disk identifier
and copies of the VxVM configuration. The removal of this information makes
the disk unusable as a VM disk.
The system root disk is always involved in reinstallation. Other disks can also be
involved. If the root disk was placed under VxVM control, that disk and any
volumes or mirrors on it are lost during reinstallation. Any other disks that are
involved in the reinstallation, or that are removed and replaced, can lose VxVM
configuration data (including volumes and mirrors).
If a disk, including the root disk, is not under VxVM control prior to the failure,
no VxVM configuration data is lost at reinstallation. For information on
replacing disks, see “Removing and Replacing Disks” in the “Administering
Disks” chapter of the Veritas Volume Manager Administrator’s Guide.
Although it simplifies the recovery process after reinstallation, not having the
root disk under Veritas Volume Manager control increases the possibility of a
reinstallation being necessary. By having the root disk under VxVM control and
creating mirrors of the root disk contents, you can eliminate many of the
problems that require system reinstallation.
When reinstallation is necessary, the only volumes saved are those that reside
on, or have copies on, disks that are not directly involved with the failure and
reinstallation. Any volumes on the root disk and other disks involved with the
failure or reinstallation are lost during reinstallation. If backup copies of these
volumes are available, the volumes can be restored after reinstallation.
 Recovery from boot disk failure 53
Recovery by reinstallation

Reinstalling the system and recovering VxVM

To reinstall the system and recover the Veritas Volume Manager configuration,
use the following procedure. These steps are described in detail in the sections
that follow:
1 “Prepare the system for reinstallation” on page 53.
Replace any failed disks or other hardware, and detach any disks not
involved in the reinstallation.
2 “Reinstall the operating system” on page 53.
Reinstall the base system and any other unrelated Volume Manager
packages.
3 “Reinstall VxVM” on page 54.
Add the Volume Manager package, but do not execute the vxinstall
command.
4 “Recover the Veritas Volume Manager configuration” on page 54.
5 “Clean up the system configuration” on page 56.
Restore any information in volumes affected by the failure or reinstallation,
and recreate system volumes (rootvol, swapvol, usr, and other system
volumes).
6 “Start up hot-relocation” on page 61.

Prepare the system for reinstallation

To prevent the loss of data on disks not involved in the reinstallation, involve
only the root disk and any other disks that contain portions of the operating
system in the reinstallation procedure. For example, if the /usr file system is
configured on a separate disk, leave that disk connected. Several of the
automatic options for installation access disks other than the root disk without
requiring confirmation from the administrator.
Disconnect all other disks containing volumes (or other data that should be
preserved) prior to reinstalling the operating system. For example, if you
originally installed the operating system with the home file system on a separate
disk, disconnect that disk to ensure that the home file system remains intact.

Reinstall the operating system

Once any failed or failing disks have been replaced and disks not involved with
the reinstallation have been detached, reinstall the operating system as
described in your operating system documentation. Install the operating system
prior to installing VxVM.
54 Recovery from boot disk failure
Recovery by reinstallation

Ensure that no disks other than the root disk are accessed in any way while the
operating system installation is in progress. If anything is written on a disk
other than the root disk, the Veritas Volume Manager configuration on that disk
may be destroyed.

Note: During reinstallation, you can change the system’s host name (or host ID).
It is recommended that you keep the existing host name, as this is assumed by
the procedures in the following sections.

Reinstall VxVM
To reinstall Veritas Volume Manager, follow these steps:
1 Load Veritas Volume Manager from CD-ROM. Follow the instructions in the
Installation Guide.

Caution: To reconstruct the Volume Manager configuration that remains on

the non-root disks, do not use vxinstall to initialize VxVM after loading
the software from CD-ROM.

2 Use the vxlicinst command to install the Veritas Volume Manager license
key (see the vxlicinst(1) manual page for more information).

Recover the Veritas Volume Manager configuration

Once the Veritas Volume Manager packages have been loaded, and you have
installed the license for VxVM, recover the Veritas Volume Manager
configuration using the following procedure:
1 Touch /etc/vx/reconfig.d/state.d/install-db.
2 Shut down the system.
3 Reattach the disks that were removed from the system.
4 Reboot the system.
5 When the system comes up, bring the system to single-user mode using the
following command:
# exec init S

6 When prompted, enter the password and press Return to continue.

7 Remove files involved with installation that were created when you loaded
VxVM, but which are no longer needed, using the following command:
# rm -rf /etc/vx/reconfig.d/state.d/install-db

 Recovery from boot disk failure 55

Recovery by reinstallation

8 Start some Veritas Volume Manager I/O daemons using the following
command:
# vxiod set 10

9 Start the Veritas Volume Manager configuration daemon, vxconfigd, in

disabled mode using the following command:
# vxconfigd -m disable

10 Initialize the vxconfigd daemon using the following command:

# vxdctl init

11 Initialize the DMP subsystem using the following command:

# vxdctl initdmp
12 Enable vxconfigd using the following command:
# vxdctl enable

The configuration preserved on the disks not involved with the reinstallation
has now been recovered. However, because the root disk has been reinstalled, it
does not appear to VxVM as a VM disk. The configuration of the preserved disks
does not include the root disk as part of the VxVM configuration.
If the root disk of your system and any other disks involved in the reinstallation
were not under VxVM control at the time of failure and reinstallation, then the
reconfiguration is complete at this point. For information on replacing disks, see
“Removing and Replacing Disks” in the “Administering Disks” chapter of the
Veritas Volume Manager Administrator’s Guide. There are several methods
available to replace a disk; choose the method that you prefer.
If the root disk (or another disk) was involved with the reinstallation, any
volumes or mirrors on that disk (or other disks no longer attached to the system)
are now inaccessible. If a volume had only one plex contained on a disk that was
reinstalled, removed, or replaced, then the data in that volume is lost and must
be restored from backup.
56 Recovery from boot disk failure
Recovery by reinstallation

Clean up the system configuration

To clean up the configuration of your system after reinstallation of VxVM, you
must address the following issues:
■ Clean up Rootability
■ Clean up Volumes
■ Clean up Disk Configuration
■ Reconfigure Rootability
■ Final Volume Reconfiguration

Clean up Rootability
To begin the cleanup of the Veritas Volume Manager configuration, remove any
volumes associated with rootability. This must be done if the root disk (and any
other disk involved in the system boot process) was under Veritas Volume
Manager control. The volumes to remove are:
■ rootvol, that contains the root file system
■ swapvol, that contains the swap area
■ (on some systems) standvol, that contains the stand file system
■ usr, that contains the /usr file system
To remove the root volume, use the vxedit command:
# vxedit -fr rm rootvol

Repeat this command, using swapvol and usr (standvol) in place of

rootvol, to remove the swap, stand, and usr volumes.

Clean up Volumes
After completing the rootability cleanup, you must determine which volumes
need to be restored from backup. The volumes to be restored include those with
all mirrors (all copies of the volume) residing on disks that have been reinstalled
or removed. These volumes are invalid and must be removed, recreated, and
restored from backup. If only some mirrors of a volume exist on reinstalled or
removed disks, these mirrors must be removed. The mirrors can be re-added
later.
To restore the volumes, perform these steps:
1 Establish which VM disks have been removed or reinstalled using the
following command:
# vxdisk list
 Recovery from boot disk failure 57
Recovery by reinstallation

This displays a list of system disk devices and the status of these devices.
For example, for a reinstalled system with three disks and a reinstalled root
disk, the output of the vxdisk list command is similar to this:
DEVICE TYPE DISK GROUP STATUS

c0t0d0s2 sliced - - error

c0t1d0s2 sliced disk02 mydg online

c0t2d0s2 sliced disk03 mydg online

- - disk01 mydg failed was:c0t0d0s2

The display shows that the reinstalled root device, c0t0d0s2, is not
associated with a VM disk and is marked with a status of error. The disks
disk02 and disk03 were not involved in the reinstallation and are
recognized by VxVM and associated with their devices (c0t1d0s2 and
c0t2d0s2). The former disk01, which was the VM disk associated with the
replaced disk device, is no longer associated with the device (c0t0d0s2).
If other disks (with volumes or mirrors on them) had been removed or
replaced during reinstallation, those disks would also have a disk device
listed in error state and a VM disk listed as not associated with a device.
2 Once you know which disks have been removed or replaced, locate all the
mirrors on failed disks using the following command:
# vxprint [-g diskgroup] -sF “%vname” -e’sd_disk = “disk”’

where disk is the access name of a disk with a failed status. Be sure to
enclose the disk name in quotes in the command. Otherwise, the command
returns an error message. The vxprint command returns a list of volumes
that have mirrors on the failed disk. Repeat this command for every disk
with a failed status.
The following is sample output from running this command:
# vxprint -g mydg -sF “%vname” -e’sd_disk = "disk01"'

v01

3 Check the status of each volume and print volume information using the
following command:
# vxprint -th volume
58 Recovery from boot disk failure
Recovery by reinstallation

where volume is the name of the volume to be examined. The vxprint

command displays the status of the volume, its plexes, and the portions of
disks that make up those plexes. For example, a volume named v01 with
only one plex resides on the reinstalled disk named disk01. The vxprint -
th v01 command produces the following output:

V NAME RVG/VSET/COKSTATE STATE LENGTH READPOL PREFPLEXUTYPE

PL NAME VOLUME KSTATE STATE LENGTH LAYOUT NCOL/WID MODE
SD NAME PLEX DISK DISKOFFS LENGTH [COL/]OFF DEVICE MODE

v v01 - DISABLED ACTIVE 24000 SELECT - fsgen

pl v01-01 v01 DISABLED NODEVICE 24000 CONCAT - RW
sd disk01-06 v01-01 disk01 245759 24000 0 c1t5d1 ENA

The only plex of the volume is shown in the line beginning with pl. The
STATE field for the plex named v01-01 is NODEVICE. The plex has space on
a disk that has been replaced, removed, or reinstalled. The plex is no longer
valid and must be removed.
4 Because v01-01 was the only plex of the volume, the volume contents are
irrecoverable except by restoring the volume from a backup. The volume
must also be removed. If a backup copy of the volume exists, you can restore
the volume later. Keep a record of the volume name and its length, as you
will need it for the backup procedure.
Remove irrecoverable volumes (such as v01) using the following command:
# vxedit -r rm v01

5 It is possible that only part of a plex is located on the failed disk. If the
volume has a striped plex associated with it, the volume is divided between
several disks. For example, the volume named v02 has one striped plex
striped across three disks, one of which is the reinstalled disk disk01. The
vxprint -th v02 command produces the following output:

V NAME RVG/VSET/COKSTATE STATE LENGTH READPOL PREFPLEXUTYPE

PL NAME VOLUME KSTATE STATE LENGTH LAYOUT NCOL/WID MODE
SD NAME PLEX DISK DISKOFFS LENGTH [COL/]OFF DEVICE MODE

v v02 - DISABLED ACTIVE 30720 SELECT v02-01 fsgen

pl v02-01 v02 DISABLED NODEVICE 30720 STRIPE 3/128 RW
sd disk02-02v02-01 disk01 424144 10240 0/0 c1t5d2 ENA
sd disk01-05v02-01 disk01 620544 10240 1/0 c1t5d3 DIS
sd disk03-01v02-01 disk03 620544 10240 2/0 c1t5d4 ENA

The display shows three disks, across which the plex v02-01 is striped (the
lines starting with sd represent the stripes). One of the stripe areas is
located on a failed disk. This disk is no longer valid, so the plex named v02-
01 has a state of NODEVICE. Since this is the only plex of the volume, the
volume is invalid and must be removed. If a copy of v02 exists on the
 Recovery from boot disk failure 59
Recovery by reinstallation

backup media, it can be restored later. Keep a record of the volume name
and length of any volume you intend to restore from backup.
Remove invalid volumes (such as v02) using the following command:
# vxedit -r rm v02
6 A volume that has one mirror on a failed disk can also have other mirrors on
disks that are still valid. In this case, the volume does not need to be restored
from backup, since the data is still valid on the valid disks.
The output of the vxprint -th command for a volume with one plex on a
failed disk (disk01) and another plex on a valid disk (disk02) is similar to
the following:
V NAME RVG/VSET/COKSTATE STATE LENGTH READPOL PREFPLEX UTYPE
PL NAME VOLUME KSTATE STATE LENGTH LAYOUT NCOL/WID MODE
SD NAME PLEX DISK DISKOFFS LENGTH [COL/]OFF DEVICE MODE

v v03 - DISABLED ACTIVE 0720 SELECT - fsgen

pl v03-01 v03 DISABLED ACTIVE 30720 CONCAT - RW
sd disk02-01 v03-01 disk01 620544 30720 0 c1t5d5 ENA
pl v03-02 v03 DISABLED NODEVICE 30720 CONCAT - RW
sd disk01-04 v03-02 disk03 262144 30720 0 c1t5d6 DIS

This volume has two plexes, v03-01 and v03-02. The first plex (v03-01)
does not use any space on the invalid disk, so it can still be used. The second
plex (v03-02) uses space on invalid disk disk01 and has a state of
NODEVICE. Plex v03-02 must be removed. However, the volume still has
one valid plex containing valid data. If the volume needs to be mirrored,
another plex can be added later. Note the name of the volume to create
another plex later.
To remove an invalid plex, use the vxplex command to dissociate and then
remove the plex from the volume. For example, to dissociate and remove
the plex v03-02, use the following command:
# vxplex -o rm dis v03-02

7 Once all the volumes have been cleaned up, clean up the disk configuration
as described in the section, “Clean up Disk Configuration” on page 59.

Clean up Disk Configuration

Once all invalid volumes and plexes have been removed, the disk configuration
can be cleaned up. Each disk that was removed, reinstalled, or replaced (as
determined from the output of the vxdisk list command) must be removed
from the configuration.
To remove the disk, use the vxdg command. To remove the failed disk disk01,
use the following command:
# vxdg rmdisk disk01
60 Recovery from boot disk failure
Recovery by reinstallation

If the vxdg command returns an error message, some invalid mirrors exist.
Repeat the processes described in “Clean up Volumes” on page 56 until all
invalid volumes and mirrors are removed.

Reconfigure Rootability
Once all the invalid disks have been removed, the replacement or reinstalled
disks can be added to Veritas Volume Manager control. If the root disk was
originally under Veritas Volume Manager control or you now wish to put the
root disk under Veritas Volume Manager control, add this disk first.
To add the root disk to Veritas Volume Manager control, use the vxdiskadm
command:
# vxdiskadm

From the vxdiskadm main menu, select menu item 2 (Encapsulate a

disk). Follow the instructions and encapsulate the root disk for the system.
When the encapsulation is complete, reboot the system to multi-user mode.

Final Volume Reconfiguration

Once the root disk is encapsulated, any other disks that were replaced should be
added using the vxdiskadm command. If the disks were reinstalled during the
operating system reinstallation, they should be encapsulated; otherwise, they
can be added.
Once all the disks have been added to the system, any volumes that were
completely removed as part of the configuration cleanup can be recreated and
their contents restored from backup. The volume recreation can be done by
using the vxassist command or the graphical user interface.
For example, to recreate the volumes v01 and v02, use the following command:
# vxassist make v01 24000

# vxassist make v02 30720 layout=stripe nstripe=3

Once the volumes are created, they can be restored from backup using normal
backup/restore procedures.
Recreate any plexes for volumes that had plexes removed as part of the volume
cleanup. To replace the plex removed from volume v03, use the following
command:
# vxassist mirror v03

Once you have restored the volumes and plexes lost during reinstallation,
recovery is complete and your system is configured as it was prior to the failure.
The final step is to start up hot-relocation, if this is required.
 Recovery from boot disk failure 61
Recovery by reinstallation

Start up hot-relocation
To start up the hot-relocation service, either reboot the system or manually
start the relocation watch daemon, vxrelocd (this also starts the vxnotify
process).

Note: Hot-relocation should only be started when you are sure that it will not
interfere with other reconfiguration procedures.

See “Modifying the Behavior of Hot-Relocation” in the “Administering Hot-

Relocation” chapter of the Veritas Volume Manager Administrator’s Guide for
more information about running vxrelocd and about modifying its behavior.
To determine if hot-relocation has been started, use the following command to
search for its entry in the process table:
# ps -ef | grep vxrelocd
62 Recovery from boot disk failure
Recovery by reinstallation
 Chapter 4
Logging commands and
transactions
This chapter provides information on how to administer logging of commands
and transactions in VERITAS Volume Manager (VxVM). For information on how
to administer error logging, see “Error messages” on page 75.

Logging commands
The vxcmdlog command allows you to log the invocation of other VxVM
commands to a file. The following table demonstrates the usage of vxcmdlog:

Table 4-1 Examples of vxcmdlog usage

Command Description

vxcmdlog -l List current settings for command logging.

vxcmdlog -m on Turn on command logging.

vxcmdlog -s 512k
Set the maximum command log file size to
512K.

vxcmdlog -n 10
Set the maximum number of historic
command log files to 10.

vxcmdlog -n no_limit
Remove any limit on the number of historic
command log files.

vxcmdlog -m off Turn off command logging.

Command lines are logged to the file, cmdlog, in the directory /etc/vx/log.
This path name is a symbolic link to a directory whose location depends on the
operating system. If required, you can redefine the directory which is linked.
64 Logging commands and transactions
Logging commands

If you want to preserve the settings of the vxcmdlog utility, you must also copy
the settings file, .cmdlog, to the new directory.

Note: The .cmdlog file is a binary and should not be edited.

The size of the command log is checked after an entry has been written so the
actual size may be slightly larger than that specified. When the log reaches a
maximum size, the current command log file, cmdlog, is renamed as the next
available historic log file, cmdlog.number, where number is an integer from 1
up to the maximum number of historic log files that is currently defined, and a
new current log file is created.
A limited number of historic log files is preserved to avoid filling up the file
system. If the maximum number of historic log files has been reached, the oldest
historic log file is removed, and the current log file is renamed as that file.
Each log file contains a header that records the host name, host ID, and the date
and time that the log was created.
The following are sample entries from a command log file:
# 0, 2329, Wed Feb 12 21:19:31 2003
/usr/sbin/vxdctl mode
# 17051, 2635, Wed Feb 12 21:19:33 2003
/usr/sbin/vxdisk -q -o alldgs list
# 0, 2722, Wed Feb 12 21:19:34 2003
/etc/vx/diag.d/vxprivutil dumpconfig /dev/vx/rdmp/Disk_4s2
# 26924, 3001, Thu Feb 13 19:30:57 2003
/usr/sbin/vxdisk list Disk_1
Each entry usually contains a client ID that identifies the command connection
to the vxconfigd daemon, the process ID of the command that is running, a time
stamp, and the command line including any arguments.
If the client ID is 0, as in the third entry shown here, this means that the
command did not open a connection to vxconfigd.
 Logging commands and transactions 65
Logging commands

Note: The client ID is the same as that recorded for the corresponding
transactions in the transactions log. See “Logging transactions” on page 66 and
“Associating command and transaction logs” on page 68 for more information.

Most command scripts are not logged, but the command binaries that they call
are logged. Exceptions are the vxdisksetup, vxinstall, and vxdiskunsetup
scripts, which are logged.

If there is an error reading from the settings file, command logging switches to
its built-in default settings. This may mean, for example, that logging remains
enabled after being disabled using vxcmdlog -m off command. If this happens,
use the vxcmdlog utility to recreate the settings file, or restore the file from a
backup.

See the vxcmdlog(1M) manual page for more information about the vxcmdlog
utility.
66 Logging commands and transactions
Logging transactions

Logging transactions
The vxtranslog command allows you to log VxVM transactions to a file. The
following table demonstrates the usage of vxtranslog:
Table 4-2 Examples of vxtranslog usage

Command Description

vxtranslog -l
List current settings for transaction
logging.

vxtranslog -m on Turn on transaction logging.

vxtranslog -s 512k
Set the maximum transaction log file size
to 512K.

vxtranslog -n 10
Set the maximum number of historic
transaction log files to 10.

vxtranslog -n no_limit
Remove any limit on the number of historic
transaction log files.

vxtranslog -q on Turn on query logging.

vxtranslog -q off Turn off query logging.

vxtranslog -m off Turn off transaction logging.

Transactions are logged to the file, translog, in the directory /etc/vx/log.

This path name is a symbolic link to a directory whose location depends on the
operating system. If required, you can redefine the directory which is linked. If
you want to preserve the settings of the vxtranslog utility, you must also copy
the settings file, .translog, to the new directory.

Note: The .translog file is a binary and should not be edited.

The size of the transaction log is checked after an entry has been written so the
actual size may be slightly larger than that specified. When the log reaches a
maximum size, the current transaction log file, translog, is renamed as the
next available historic log file, translog.number, where number is an integer
from 1 up to the maximum number of historic log files that is currently defined,
and a new current log file is created.
A limited number of historic log files is preserved to avoid filling up the file
system. If the maximum number of historic log files has been reached, the oldest
historic log file is removed, and the current log file is renamed as that file.
 Logging commands and transactions 67
Logging transactions

Each log file contains a header that records the host name, host ID, and the date
and time that the log was created.
The following are sample entries from a transaction log file:
Thu Feb 13 19:30:57 2003
Clid = 26924, PID = 3001, Part = 0, Status = 0, Abort Reason = 0
DA_GET SENA0_1
DISK_GET_ATTRS SENA0_1
DISK_DISK_OP SENA0_1 8
DEVNO_GET SENA0_1
DANAME_GET 0x1d801d8 0x1d801a0
GET_ARRAYNAME SENA 50800200000e78b8
CTLR_PTOLNAME /pci@1f,4000/pci@5/SUNW,qlc@4/fp@0,0
GET_ARRAYNAME SENA 50800200000e78b8
CTLR_PTOLNAME /pci@1f,4000/pci@5/SUNW,qlc@5/fp@0,0
DISCONNECT <no request data>
The first line of each log entry is the time stamp of the transaction. The Clid
field corresponds to the client ID for the connection that the command opened
to vxconfigd. The PID field shows the process ID of the utility that is requesting
the operation. The Status and Abort Reason fields contain error codes if the
transaction does not complete normally. The remainder of the record shows the
data that was used in processing the transaction.

Note: The client ID is the same as that recorded for the corresponding command
line in the command log. See “Logging commands” on page 63 and “Associating
command and transaction logs” on page 68 for more information.

If there is an error reading from the settings file, transaction logging switches to
its built-in default settings. This may mean, for example, that logging remains
enabled after being disabled using vxtranslog -m off command. If this happens,
use the vxtranslog utility to recreate the settings file, or restore the file from a
backup.
68 Logging commands and transactions
Associating command and transaction logs

Associating command and transaction logs

The Client and process IDs that are recorded for every request and command
assist you in correlating entries in the command and transaction logs. To find
out which command issued a particular request in transaction log, use a
command such as the following to search for the process ID and the client ID in
the command log:
# egrep -n PID cmdlog | egrep Clid
In this example, the following request was recorded in the transaction log:
Wed Feb 12 21:19:36 2003
Clid = 8309, PID = 2778, Part = 0, Status = 0, Abort Reason = 0
DG_IMPORT foodg
DG_IMPORT foodg
DISCONNECT <no request data>
To locate the utility that issued this request, the command would be:
# egrep -n 2778 cmdlog | egrep 8309
7310:# 8309, 2778, Wed Feb 12 21:19:36 2003
The output from the example shows a match at line 7310 in the command log.
Examining lines 7310 and 7311 in the command log indicates that the vxdg
import command was run on the foodg disk group:
# sed -e ’7310,7311!d’ cmdlog
# 8309, 2778, Wed Feb 12 21:19:36 2003 7311
/usr/sbin/vxdg -m import foodg

Note: If there are multiple matches for the combination of the client and process
ID, you can determine the correct match by examining the time stamp.

If a utility opens a conditional connection to vxconfigd, its client ID is shown as

zero in the command log, and as a non-zero value in the transaction log. You can
use the process ID and time stamp to relate the log entries in such cases.
 Chapter 5
Backing up and restoring

disk group configurations

Disk group configuration backup and restoration allows you to backup and
restore all configuration data for Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) disk groups,
and for VxVM objects such as volumes that are configured within the disk
groups. Using this feature, you can recover from corruption of a disk group’s
configuration that is stored as metadata in the private region of a VM disk. After
the disk group configuration has been restored, and the volume enabled, the
user data in the public region is available again without the need to restore this
from backup media.

Caution: The backup and restore utilities act only on VxVM configuration data.
They do not back up or restore any user or application data that is contained
within volumes or other VxVM objects. If you use vxdiskunsetup and
vxdisksetup on a disk, and specify attributes that differ from those in the
configuration backup, this may corrupt the public region and any user data
therein.

The vxconfigbackupd daemon monitors changes to the VxVM configuration

and automatically records any configuration changes that occur. Two utilities,
vxconfigbackup and vxconfigrestore, are provided for backing up and
restoring a VxVM configuration for a disk group.
When importing a disk group, any of the following errors indicate that the disk
group configuration and/or disk private region headers have become corrupted:
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-569 Disk group group,Disk disk:Cannot
auto-import group: reason
The reason for the error is usually one of the following:
Configuration records are inconsistent
Disk group has no valid configuration copies
Duplicate record in configuration
70 Backing up and restoring disk group configurations
Backing up a disk group configuration

Errors in some configuration copies­

Format error in configuration copy­
Invalid block number­
Invalid magic number­
If VxVM cannot update a disk group’s configuration because of disk errors, it

disables the disk group and displays the following error:

VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-123 Disk group group: Disabled by errors­

If such errors occur, you can restore the disk group configuration from a backup

after you have corrected any underlying problem such as failed or disconnected

hardware.

Configuration data from a backup allows you to reinstall the private region

headers of VxVM disks in a disk group whose headers have become damaged, to

recreate a corrupted disk group configuration, or to recreate a disk group and

the VxVM objects within it. You can also use the configuration data to recreate a

disk group on another system if the original system is not available.

Note: Restoration of a disk group configuration requires that the same physical
disks are used as were configured in the disk group when the backup was taken.

The following sections describe how to back up and restore disk group
configurations.

Backing up a disk group configuration

VxVM uses the disk group configuration daemon to monitor the configuration
of disk groups, and to back up the configuration whenever it is changed. By
default, the five most recent backups are preserved. If required, you can also
back up a disk group configuration by running the vxconfigbackup command.
The following table describes the files that record disk group configuration
information:

Table 5-1 Files that record disk group configuration

Backup files Description

/etc/vx/cbr/bk/diskgroup.dgid/dgid.dginfo Disk group information.

/etc/vx/cbr/bk/diskgroup.dgid/dgid .diskinfo Disk attributes.

/etc/vx/cbr/bk/diskgroup.dgid/dgid .binconfig Binary configuration copy.

/etc/vx/cbr/bk/diskgroup.dgid/dgid.cfgrec
Configuration records in
vxprint -m format.
 Backing up and restoring disk group configurations 71
Restoring a disk group configuration

Here diskgroup is the name of the disk group, and dgid is the disk group ID. If a
disk group is to be recreated on another system, copy these files to that system.

Caution: Take care that you do not overwrite any files on the target system that
are used by a disk group on that system.

To back up a disk group manually, use this command:

# /etc/vx/bin/vxconfigbackup diskgroup
To back up all disk groups, use this version of the command:
# /etc/vx/bin/vxconfigbackup
For more information, see the vxconfigbackup(1M) manual page.

Restoring a disk group configuration

You can use the vxconfigrestore utility to restore or recreate a disk group from
its configuration backup. The restoration process has two stages: precommit and
commit. In the precommit stage, you can examine the configuration of the disk
group that would be restored from the backup. The actual disk group
configuration is not permanently restored until you choose to commit the
changes.

Note: None of the disks or VxVM objects in the disk group may be open or in use
by any application while the restoration is being performed.

You can choose whether or not any corrupted disk headers are to be reinstalled
at this stage. If any of the disks’ private region headers are invalid, restoration
may not be possible without reinstalling the headers for the affected disks.
The following command performs a precommit analysis of the state of the disk
group configuration, and reinstalls the disk headers where these have become
corrupted:
#

/etc/vx/bin/vxconfigrestore -p [-l directory] \

{diskgroup | dgid}
The disk group can be specified either by name or by ID.
The -l option allows you to specify a directory for the location of the backup
configuration files other than the default location, /etc/vx/cbr/bk. See
“Backing up a disk group configuration” on page 70 for details.
To specify that the disk headers are not to be reinstalled, use this form of the
command:
#

/etc/vx/bin/vxconfigrestore -n [-l directory] \

{diskgroup | dgid}
72 Backing up and restoring disk group configurations
Restoring a disk group configuration

At the precommit stage, you can use the vxprint command to examine the
configuration that the restored disk group will have. You can choose to proceed
to commit the changes and restore the disk group configuration. Alternatively,
you can cancel the restoration before any permanent changes have been made.
To abandon restoration at the precommit stage, use this command:
#

/etc/vx/bin/vxconfigrestore -d [-l directory] \

{diskgroup | dgid}
To commit the changes that are required to restore the disk group
configuration, use the following command:
#

/etc/vx/bin/vxconfigrestore -c [-l directory] \

{diskgroup | dgid}
If no disk headers are reinstalled, the configuration copies in the disks’ private
regions are updated from the latest binary copy of the configuration that was
saved for the disk group.
If any of the disk headers are reinstalled, a saved copy of the disks’ attributes is
used to recreate their private and public regions. These disks are also assigned
new disk IDs. The VxVM objects within the disk group are then recreated using
the backup configuration records for the disk group. This process also has the
effect of creating new configuration copies in the disk group.
Volumes are synchronized in the background. For large volume configurations,
it may take some time to perform the synchronization. You can use the vxtask -
l list command to monitor the progress of this operation.

Note: Disks that are in use or whose layout has been changed are excluded from
the restoration process.

For more information, see the vxconfigrestore(1M) manual page.

Resolving conflicting backups for a disk group

In some circumstances where disks have been replaced on a system, there may
exist several conflicting backups for a disk group. In this case, you see a message
similar to the following from the vxconfigrestore command:
VxVM vxconfigrestore ERROR V-5-1-6012 There are two backups that ­
have the same diskgroup name with different diskgroup id : ­
1047336696.19.xxx.veritas.com­
1049135264.31.xxx.veritas.com­
The solution is to specify the disk group by its ID rather than by its name to
perform the restoration. The backup file, /etc/vx/cbr/bk/diskgroup. dgid/
dgid.dginfo, contains a timestamp that records when the backup was taken.
 Backing up and restoring disk group configurations 73
Restoring a disk group configuration

The following is a sample extract from such a backup file that shows the
timestamp and disk group ID information:
TIMESTAMP­
Tue Apr 15 23:27:01 PDT 2003 ­
.­
.­
.­
DISK_GROUP_CONFIGURATION­
Group: mydg­
dgid: 1047336696.19.xxx.veritas.com­
.­
.­
.­
Use the timestamp information to decide which backup contains the relevant
information, and use the vxconfigrestore command to restore the
configuration by specifying the disk group ID instead of the disk group name.
74 Backing up and restoring disk group configurations
Restoring a disk group configuration
 Chapter 6
Error messages
This chapter provides information on error messages associated with the
Veritas Volume Manager (VxVM) configuration daemon (vxconfigd), the
kernel, and other utilities. It covers most informational, failure, and error
messages displayed on the console by vxconfigd, and by the Veritas Volume
Manager kernel driver, vxio. These include some errors that are infrequently
encountered and difficult to troubleshoot.

Note: Some error messages described here may not apply to your system.

Clarifications are included to elaborate on the situation or problem that

generated a particular message. Wherever possible, a recovery procedure
(Action) is provided to help you to locate and correct the problem.
You may find it useful to consult the VxVM command and transaction logs to
understand the context in which an error occurred. See “Logging commands and
transactions” on page 63 for more information.

Logging error messages

VxVM provides the option of logging debug messages to a file. This logging is
useful in that any messages output just before a system crash will be available in
the log file (presuming that the crash does not result in file system corruption).
If enabled, the default debug log file is /var/vxvm/vxconfigd.log.
vxconfigd also supports the use of syslog to log all of its regular console
messages. When this is enabled, all console output is directed through the
syslog interface.
syslog and log file logging can be used together to provide reliable logging to a
private log file, along with distributed logging through syslogd.
76 Error messages
Logging error messages

Note: syslog logging is enabled by default. Debug message logging is disabled

by default.

If syslog output is enabled, messages with a priority higher than Debug are
written to /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log.
To enable logging of debug output to the default debug log file, /var/vxvm/
vxconfigd.log, edit the startup script for vxconfigd as described in
“Configuring logging in the startup script” on page 76, or use the following
command:
# vxdctl debug level [pathname]

There are 10 possible levels of debug logging with the values 0 through 9. Level 1
provides the least detail, and 9 the most. Level 0 turns off logging. If a path name
is specified, this file is used to record the debug output instead of the default
debug log file. If the vxdctl debug command is used, the new debug logging level
and debug log file remain in effect until the VxVM configuration daemon,
vxconfigd, is next restarted.

Configuring logging in the startup script

To enable log file or syslog logging on a permanent basis, you can edit the
following portion of the /lib/svc/method/vxvm-sysboot (in Solaris 10) or
/etc/init.d/vxvm-sysboot (in previous releases of the Solaris OS) script
that starts the VxVM configuration daemon, vxconfigd:
# comment-out or uncomment any of the following lines to enable or

disable the corresponding feature in vxconfigd.

opts=”$opts -x syslog”

# use syslog for console messages

#opts=”$opts -x log”

# messages to vxconfigd.log

#opts=”$opts -x logfile=/foo/bar” # specify an alternate log file

#opts=”$opts -x timestamp”

# timestamp console messages

# To turn on debugging console output, uncomment the following line.

# The debug level can be set higher for more output. The highest

# debug level is 9.

#debug=1

# enable debugging console output

Comment or uncomment the lines corresponding to the features that you want
to be disabled or enabled at startup.
 Error messages 77
Understanding messages

For example, the opts=”$opts -x syslog” string is usually uncommented

so that vxconfigd uses syslog logging by default. Inserting a # character at the
beginning of the line turns off syslog logging for vxconfigd.
If you do not specify a debug level, only Error, Fatal Error, Warning, and Notice
messages are logged. Debug messages are not logged.
After making changes to the way vxconfigd is invoked in the startup file, run
the following command on a Solaris 10 system to notify that the service
configuration has been changed:
# svcadm refresh vxvm/vxvm-sysboot

Note: By default, vxconfigd is started at boot time with the -x syslog option.
This redirects vxconfigd console messages to syslog. If you want to retain this
behavior when restarting vxconfigd from the command line, include the -x
syslog argument, as restarting vxconfigd does not preserve the option
settings with which it was previously running. Similarly, any Veritas Volume
Manager operations that require vxconfigd to be restarted may not retain the
behavior that was previously specified by option settings.

For more information on logging options for vxconfigd, refer to the

vxconfigd(1M) manual page.

Understanding messages
VxVM is fault-tolerant and resolves most problems without system
administrator intervention. If the configuration daemon, vxconfigd, recognizes
the actions that are necessary, it queues up the transactions that are required.
VxVM provides atomic changes of system configurations; either a transaction
completes fully, or the system is left in the same state as though the transaction
was never attempted. If vxconfigd is unable to recognize and fix system
problems, the system administrator needs to handle the task of problem solving
using the diagnostic messages that are returned from the software. The
following sections describe error message numbers and the types of error
message that may be seen, and provide a list of the more common errors, a
detailed description of the likely cause of the problem together with suggestions
for any actions that can be taken.
Messages have the following generic format:
product component severity message_number message_text

For Veritas Volume Manager, the product is set to VxVM. The component can be
the name of a kernel module or driver such as vxdmp, a configuration daemon
such as vxconfigd, or a command such as vxassist.
78 Error messages
Understanding messages

Note: For full information about saving system crash information, see the
Solaris System Administation Guide.

Messages are divided into the following types of severity in decreasing order of
impact on the system:
PANIC A panic is a severe event as it halts a system during its normal
operation. A panic message from the kernel module or from a
device driver indicates a hardware problem or software
inconsistency so severe that the system cannot continue. The
operating system may also provide a dump of the CPU register
contents and a stack trace to aid in identifying the cause of the
panic. The following is an example of such a message:
VxVM vxio PANIC V-5-0-239 Object association depth overflow

FATAL ERROR A fatal error message from a configuration daemon, such as

vxconfigd, indicates a severe problem with the operation of
VxVM that prevents it from running. The following is an
example of such a message:
VxVM vxconfigd FATAL ERROR V-5-0-591 Disk group bootdg:

Inconsistency -- Not loaded into kernel

ERROR An error message from a command indicates that the

requested operation cannot be performed correctly. The
following is an example of such a message:
VxVM vxassist ERROR V-5-1-5150 Insufficient number of active

snapshot mirrors in snapshot_volume.

WARNING A warning message from the kernel indicates that a non-

critical operation has failed, possibly because some resource is
not available or the operation is not possible. The following is
an example of such a message:
VxVM vxio WARNING V-5-0-55 Cannot find device number for boot_path

NOTICE A notice message indicates that an error has occurred that

should be monitored. Shutting down the system is
unnecessary, although you may need to take action to remedy
the fault at a later date. The following is an example of such a
message:
VxVM vxio NOTICE V-5-0-252 read error on object subdisk of mirror
plex in volume volume (start offset, length length) corrected.
 Error messages 79
Understanding messages

INFO An informational message does not indicate an error, and

requires no action.
The unique message number consists of an alpha-numeric string that begins
with the letter “V”. For example, in the message number, V-5-1-3141, “V”
indicates that this is a Veritas product error message, the first numeric field (5)
encodes the product (in this case, VxVM), the second field (1) represents
information about the product component, and the third field (3141) is the
message index. The text of the error message follows the message number.

Messages
This section contains a list of messages that you may encounter during the
operation of Veritas Volume Manager. However, the list is not exhaustive and
the second field may contain the name of different command, driver or module
from that shown here.
If you encounter a product error message, record the unique message number
preceding the text of the message. When contacting Veritas Technical Support,
either by telephone or by visiting the Veritas Technical Support website, be sure
to provide the relevant message number. Veritas Technical Support will use this
message number to quickly determine if there are TechNotes or other
information available for you.

V-5-0-2
VxVM vxio WARNING V-5-0-2 object_type object_name block

offset:Uncorrectable read error ...

VxVM vxio WARNING V-5-0-2 object_type object_name block

offset:Uncorrectable write error ...

■ Description: A read or write operation from or to the specifiedVeritas

Volume Manager object failed. An error is returned to the application.
■ Action: These errors may represent lost data. Data may need to be restored
and failed media may need to be repaired or replaced. Depending on the type
of object failing and on the type of recovery suggested for the object type, an
appropriate recovery operation may be necessary.

V-5-0-4
VxVM vxio WARNING V-5-0-4 Plex plex detached from volume volume
■ Description: An uncorrectable error was detected by the mirroring code and
a mirror copy was detached.
■ Action: To restore redundancy, it may be necessary to add another mirror.
The disk on which the failure occurred should be reformatted or replaced.
80 Error messages
Understanding messages

Note: This message may also appear during a plex detach operation in a
cluster. In this case, no action is required.

V-5-0-34

VxVM vxdmp NOTICE V-5-0-34 added disk array disk_array_serial_number

■ Description: A new disk array has been added to the host.

■ Action: None.

V-5-0-35
VxVM vxdmp NOTICE V-5-0-35 Attempt to disable controller
controller_name failed. Rootdisk has just one enabled path.
■ Description: An attempt is being made to disable the one remaining active
path to the root disk controller.
■ Action: The path cannot be disabled.

V-5-0-55

VxVM vxio WARNING V-5-0-55 Cannot find device number for boot_path

vxvm vxdmp WARNING V-5-0-55 Cannot find device number for boot_path

■ Description: The boot path retrieved from the system PROMs cannot be
converted to a valid device number.
■ Action: Check your PROM settings for the correct boot string.

If a target driver, such as an ATF, coexists with VxVM, and the target driver
claims the boot disk, the message may be ignored if the device path
corresponds to the boot disk.

V-5-0-64
VxVM vxio WARNING V-5-0-64 cannot log commit record for Diskgroup

bootdg: error 28

■ Description: Usually means that multipathing is misconfigured.

■ Action: See “V-5-1-5929” on page 122 for possible causes and solutions.
 Error messages 81
Understanding messages

V-5-0-106

VxVM vxio WARNING V-5-0-106 detaching RAID-5 volume

■ Description: Either a double-failure condition in the RAID-5 volume has

been detected in the kernel or some other fatal error is preventing further
use of the array.
■ Action: If two or more disks have been lost due to a controller or power
failure, use the vxrecover utility to recover them once they have been re-
attached to the system. Check for other console error messages that may
provide additional information about the failure.

V-5-0-108
VxVM vxio WARNING V-5-0-108 Device major, minor: Received spurious
close
■ Description: A close was received for an object that was not open. This can
only happen if the operating system is not correctly tracking opens and
closes.
■ Action: No action is necessary; the system will continue.

V-5-0-110
VxVM vxdmp NOTICE V-5-0-110 disabled controller controller_name
connected to disk array disk_array_serial_number
■ Description: All paths through the controller connected to the disk array are
disabled. This usually happens if a controller is disabled for maintenance.
■ Action: None.

V-5-0-111

VxVM vxdmp NOTICE V-5-0-111 disabled dmpnode dmpnode_device_number

■ Description: A DMP node has been marked disabled in the DMP database. It
will no longer be accessible for further IO requests. This occurs when all
paths controlled by a DMP node are in the disabled state, and therefore
inaccessible.
■ Action: Check hardware or enable the appropriate controllers to enable at
least one path under this DMP node.
82 Error messages
Understanding messages

V-5-0-112
VxVM vxdmp NOTICE V-5-0-112 disabled path path_device_number belonging
to dmpnode dmpnode_device_number
■ Description: A path has been marked disabled in the DMP database. This
path is controlled by the DMP node indicated by the specified device
number. This may be due to a hardware failure.
■ Action: Check the underlying hardware if you want to recover the desired
path.

V-5-0-144
VxVM vxio WARNING V-5-0-144 Double failure condition detected on
RAID-5 volume
■ Description: I/O errors have been received in more than one column of a
RAID-5 volume. This could be caused by:
■ a controller failure making more than a single drive unavailable
■ the loss of a second drive while running in degraded mode
■ two separate disk drives failing simultaneously (unlikely)
■ Action: Correct the hardware failures if possible. Then recover the volume
using the vxrecover command.

V-5-0-145

VxVM vxio WARNING V-5-0-145 DRL volume volume is detached

■ Description: A Dirty Region Logging volume became detached because a

DRL log entry could not be written. If this is due to a media failure, other
errors may have been logged to the console.
■ Action: The volume containing the DRL log continues in operation. If the
system fails before the DRL has been repaired, a full recovery of the volume’s
contents may be necessary and will be performed automatically when the
system is restarted. To recover from this error, use the vxassist addlog
command to add a new DRL log to the volume.

V-5-0-146
VxVM vxdmp NOTICE V-5-0-146 enabled controller controller_name
connected to disk array disk_array_serial_number
■ Description: All paths through the controller connected to the disk array are
enabled. This usually happens if a controller is enabled after maintenance.
■ Action: None.
 Error messages 83
Understanding messages

V-5-0-147
VxVM vxdmp NOTICE V-5-0-147 enabled dmpnode dmpnode_device_number
■ Description: A DMP node has been marked enabled in the DMP database.
This happens when at least one path controlled by the DMP node has been
enabled.
■ Action: None.

V-5-0-148
VxVM vxdmp NOTICE V-5-0-148 enabled path path_device_number belonging
to dmpnode dmpnode_device_number
■ Description: A path has been marked enabled in the DMP database. This
path is controlled by the DMP node indicated by the specified device
number. This happens if a previously disabled path has been repaired, the
user has reconfigured the DMP database using the vxdctl(1M) command, or
the DMP database has been reconfigured automatically.
■ Action: None.

V-5-0-164
VxVM vxio WARNING V-5-0-164 Failed to join cluster name, aborting

■ Description: A node failed to join a cluster. This may be caused by the node
being unable to see all the shared disks. Other error messages may provide
more information about the disks that cannot be found.
■ Action: Use the vxdisk -s list command on the master node to see what
disks should be visible to the slave node. Then check that the operating
system and VxVM on the failed node can also see these disks. If the
operating system cannot see the disks, check the cabling and hardware
configuration of the node. If only VxVM cannot see the disks, use the vxdctl
enable command to make it scan again for the disks. When the disks are
visible to VxVM on the node, retry the join.

V-5-0-166
VxVM vxio WARNING V-5-0-166 Failed to log the detach of the DRL
volume volume
■ Description: An attempt failed to write a kernel log entry indicating the loss
of a DRL volume. The attempted write to the log failed either because the
kernel log is full, or because of a write error to the drive. The volume
becomes detached.
84 Error messages
Understanding messages

■ Action: Messages about log failures are usually fatal, unless the problem is
transient. However, the kernel log is sufficiently redundant that such errors
are unlikely to occur.
If the problem is not transient (that is, the drive cannot be fixed and
brought back online without data loss), recreate the disk group from scratch
and restore all of its volumes from backups. Even if the problem is
transient, reboot the system after correcting the problem.
If error messages are seen from the disk driver, it is likely that the last copy
of the log failed due to a disk error. Replace the failed drive in the disk
group. The log re-initializes on the new drive. Finally force the failed
volume into an active state and recover the data.

V-5-0-168
VxVM vxio WARNING V-5-0-168 Failure in RAID-5 logging operation

■ Description: Indicates that a RAID-5 log has failed.

■ Action: To restore RAID-5 logging to a RAID-5 volume, create a new log plex
and attach it to the volume.

V-5-0-181
VxVM vxio WARNING V-5-0-181 Illegal vminor encountered

■ Description: An attempt was made to open a volume device other than the
root volume device before vxconfigd loaded the volume configuration.
■ Action: None; under normal startup conditions, this message should not
occur. If necessary, start VxVM and re-attempt the operation.

V-5-0-194
VxVM vxio WARNING V-5-0-194 Kernel log full: volume detached
■ Description: A plex detach failed because the kernel log was full. As a result,
the mirrored volume will become detached.
■ Action: It is unlikely that this condition ever occurs. The only corrective
action is to reboot the system.

V-5-0-196
VxVM vxio WARNING V-5-0-196 Kernel log update failed: volume detached
■ Description: Detaching a plex failed because the kernel log could not be
flushed to disk. As a result, the mirrored volume became detached. This may
be caused by all the disks containing a kernel log going bad.
 Error messages 85
Understanding messages

■ Action: Repair or replace the failed disks so that kernel logging can once
again function.

V-5-0-207
VxVM vxio WARNING V-5-0-207 log object object_name detached from
RAID-5 volume
■ Description: Indicates that a RAID-5 log has failed.
■ Action: To restore RAID-5 logging to a RAID-5 volume, create a new log plex
and attach it to the volume.

V-5-0-216

VxVM vxio WARNING V-5-0-216 mod_install returned errno

■ Description: A call made to the operating system mod_install function to

load the vxio driver failed.
■ Action: Check for additional console messages that may explain why the
load failed. Also check the console messages log file for any additional
messages that were logged but not displayed on the console.

V-5-0-237
VxVM vxio WARNING V-5-0-237 object subdisk detached from RAID-5 volume
at column column offset offset
■ Description: A subdisk was detached from a RAID-5 volume because of the
failure of a disk or an uncorrectable error occurring on that disk.
■ Action: Check for other console error messages indicating the cause of the
failure. Replace a failed disk as soon as possible.

V-5-0-243
VxVM vxio WARNING V-5-0-243 Overlapping mirror plex detached from
volume volume
■ Description: An error has occurred on the last complete plex in a mirrored
volume. Any sparse mirrors that map the failing region are detached so that
they cannot be accessed to satisfy that failed region inconsistently.
■ Action: The message indicates that some data in the failing region may no
longer be stored redundantly.
86 Error messages
Understanding messages

V-5-0-244
VxVM vxdmp NOTICE V-5-0-244 Path failure on major/minor
■ Description: A path under the control of the DMP driver failed. The device
major and minor numbers of the failed device is supplied in the message.
■ Action: None.

V-5-0-249
VxVM vxio WARNING V-5-0-249 RAID-5 volume entering degraded mode
operation
■ Description: An uncorrectable error has forced a subdisk to detach. At this
point, not all data disks exist to provide the data upon request. Instead,
parity regions are used to regenerate the data for each stripe in the array.
Consequently, access takes longer and involves reading from all drives in the
stripe.
■ Action: Check for other console error messages that indicate the cause of the
failure. Replace any failed disks as soon as possible.

V-5-0-251
VxVM vxio WARNING V-5-0-251 read error on object object of mirror
plex in volume volume (start offset length length)
■ Description: An error was detected while reading from a mirror. This error
may lead to further action shown by later error messages.
■ Action: If the volume is mirrored, no further action is necessary since the
alternate mirror’s contents will be written to the failing mirror; this is often
sufficient to correct media failures. If this error occurs often, but never leads
to a plex detach, there may be a marginally defective region on the disk at
the position indicated. It may eventually be necessary to remove data from
this disk (see the vxevac(1M) manual page) and then to reformat the drive.
If the volume is not mirrored, this message indicates that some data could
not be read. The file system or other application reading the data may
report an additional error, but in either event, data has been lost. The
volume can be partially salvaged and moved to another location if desired.

Note: This message may also appear during a plex detach operation in a
cluster. In this case, no action is required.
 Error messages 87
Understanding messages

V-5-0-252
VxVM vxio NOTICE V-5-0-252 read error on object subdisk of mirror
plex in volume volume (start offset length length) corrected
■ Description: A read error occurred, which caused a read of an alternate
mirror and a writeback to the failing region. This writeback was successful
and the data was corrected on disk.
■ Action: None; the problem was corrected automatically. Note the location of
the failure for future reference. If the same region of the subdisk fails again,
this may indicate a more insidious failure and the disk should be
reformatted at the next reasonable opportunity.

V-5-0-258
VxVM vxdmp NOTICE V-5-0-258 removed disk array disk_array_serial_number
■ Description: A disk array has been disconnected from the host, or some
hardware failure has resulted in the disk array becoming inaccessible to the
host.
■ Action: Replace disk array hardware if this has failed.

V-5-0-281
VxVM vxio WARNING V-5-0-281 Root volumes are not supported on your

PROM version.

■ Description: If your system’s PROMs are not a recent OpenBoot PROM type,
root volumes are unusable.
■ Action: If you have set up a root volume, undo the configuration by running
vxunroot or removing the rootdev line from /etc/system as soon as
possible. Contact your hardware vendor for an upgrade to your PROM level.

V-5-0-386
VxVM vxio WARNING V-5-0-386 subdisk subdisk failed in plex plex in
volume volume
■ Description: The kernel has detected a subdisk failure, which may mean that
the underlying disk is failing.
■ Action: Check for obvious problems with the disk (such as a disconnected
cable). If hot-relocation is enabled and the disk is failing, recovery from
subdisk failure is handled automatically.
88 Error messages
Understanding messages

V-5-1-90
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-90 mode: Unrecognized operating mode
■ Description: An invalid string was specified as an argument to the -m option.
Valid strings are: enable, disable, and boot.
■ Action: Supply a correct option argument.

V-5-1-91
VxVM vxconfigd WARNING V-5-1-91 Cannot create device device_path:
reason
■ Description: vxconfigd cannot create a device node either under /dev/
vx/dsk or under /dev/vx/rdsk. This should happen only if the root file
system has run out of inodes.
■ Action: Remove some unwanted files from the root file system. Then,
regenerate the device node using the command:
# vxdctl enable

V-5-1-92
VxVM vxconfigd WARNING V-5-1-92 Cannot exec /usr/bin/rm to remove
directory: reason
■ Description: The given directory could not be removed because the /usr/
bin/rm utility could not be executed by vxconfigd. This is not a serious
error. The only side effect of a directory not being removed is that the
directory and its contents continue to use space in the root file system.
However, this does imply that the /usr file system is not mounted, or on
some systems, that the rm utility is missing or is not in its usual location.
This may be a serious problem for the general running of your system.
■ Action: If the /usr file system is not mounted, you need to determine how to
get it mounted. If the rm utility is missing, or is not in the /usr/bin
directory, restore it.
 Error messages 89
Understanding messages

V-5-1-111
VxVM vxconfigd WARNING V-5-1-111 Cannot fork to remove directory
directory: reason
■ Description: The given directory could not be removed because vxconfigd
could not fork in order to run the rm utility. This is not a serious error. The
only side effect of a directory not being removed is that the directory and its
contents will continue to use space in the root file system. The most likely
cause for this error is that your system does not have enough memory or
paging space to allow vxconfigd to fork.
■ Action: If your system is this low on memory or paging space, your overall
system performance is probably substantially degraded. Consider adding
more memory or paging space.

V-5-1-116
VxVM vxconfigd WARNING V-5-1-116 Cannot open log file log_filename:
reason
■ Description: The vxconfigd console output log file could not be opened for
the given reason.
■ Action: Create any needed directories, or use a different log file path name as
described in “Logging error messages” on page 75.

V-5-1-117
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-117 Cannot start volume volume, no valid
plexes
■ Description: This error indicates that the volume cannot be started because
it does not contain any valid plexes. This can happen, for example, if disk
failures have caused all plexes to be unusable. It can also happen as a result
of actions that caused all plexes to become unusable (for example, forcing
the dissociation of subdisks or detaching, dissociation, or offlining of
plexes).
■ Action: It is possible that this error results from a drive that failed to spin
up. If so, rebooting may fix the problem. If that does not fix the problem,
then the only recourse is to repair the disks involved with the plexes and
restore the file system from a backup. Restoring the root or /usr file
system requires that you have a valid backup. See “Repairing root or /usr
file systems on mirrored volumes” on page 45 for information on how to fix
problems with root or /usr file system volumes.
90 Error messages
Understanding messages

V-5-1-121
VxVM vxconfigd NOTICE V-5-1-121 Detached disk disk
■ Description: The named disk appears to have become unusable and was
detached from its disk group. Additional messages may appear to indicate
other records detached as a result of the disk detach.
■ Action: If hot-relocation is enabled, Veritas Volume Manager objects affected
by the disk failure are taken care of automatically. Mail is sent to root
indicating what actions were taken by VxVM and what further actions the
administrator should take.

V-5-1-122
VxVM vxconfigd WARNING V-5-1-122 Detaching plex plex from volume
volume
■ Description: This error only happens for volumes that are started
automatically by vxconfigd at system startup (that is, for the root and /
usr file system volumes). The plex is being detached as a result of I/O
failure, disk failure during startup or prior to the last system shutdown or
crash, or disk removal prior to the last system shutdown or crash.
■ Action: To ensure that the root or /usr file system retains the same
number of active mirrors, remove the given plex and add a new mirror using
the vxassist mirror operation. Also consider replacing any bad disks
before running this command.

V-5-1-123
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-123 Disk group group: Disabled by errors
■ Description: This message indicates that some error condition has made it
impossible for VxVM to continue to manage changes to a disk group. The
major reason for this is that too many disks have failed, making it
impossible for vxconfigd to continue to update configuration copies.
There should be a preceding error message that indicates the specific error
that was encountered.
If the disk group that was disabled is the boot disk group, the following
additional error is displayed:
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-104 All transactions are disabled
This additional message indicates that vxconfigd has entered the
disabled state, which makes it impossible to change the configuration of
any disk group, not just the boot disk group.
 Error messages 91
Understanding messages

■ Action: If the underlying error resulted from a transient failure, such as a

disk cabling error, then you may be able to repair the situation by rebooting.
Otherwise, the disk group configuration may have to be recreated by using
the procedures given in “Restoring a disk group configuration” on page 71,
and the contents of any volumes restored from a backup. Failure of the boot
disk group may require reinstallation of the system if your system uses a
root or /usr file system that is defined on a volume.

V-5-1-124
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-124 Disk group group: update failed: reason
■ Description: I/O failures have prevented vxconfigd from updating any
active copies of the disk group configuration. This usually implies a large
number of disk failures. This error will usually be followed by the error:
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-123 Disk group group: Disabled by
errors
■ Action: If the underlying error resulted from a transient failure, such as a
disk cabling error, then you may be able to repair the situation by rebooting.
Otherwise, the disk group may have to be recreated and restored from a
backup.

V-5-1-134
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-134 Memory allocation failure

■ Description: This implies that there is insufficient memory to start VxVM

and to get the volumes for the root and /usr file systems running.
■ Action: This error should not normally occur, unless your system has very
small amounts of memory. Adding swap space will probably not help
because this error is most likely to occur early in the boot sequence, before
swap areas have been added.

V-5-1-135
VxVM vxconfigd FATAL ERROR V-5-1-135 Memory allocation failure

during startup

■ Description: This implies that there is insufficient memory to start up VxVM

and to get the volumes for the root and /usr file systems running.
■ Action: This error should not normally occur, unless your system has very
small amounts of memory. Adding swap space probably will not help,
because this error is most likely to occur early in the boot sequence, before
swap areas have been added.
92 Error messages
Understanding messages

V-5-1-148
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-148 System startup failed

■ Description: Either the root or the /usr file system volume could not be
started, rendering the system unusable. The error that resulted in this
condition should appear prior to this error message.
■ Action: Look up other error messages appearing on the console and take the
actions suggested in the descriptions of those messages.

V-5-1-169
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-169 cannot open /dev/vx/config: reason
■ Description: The /dev/vx/config device could not be opened. vxconfigd
uses this device to communicate with the Veritas Volume Manager kernel
drivers. The most likely reason is “Device is already open.” This indicates
that some process (most likely vxconfigd) already has /dev/vx/config
open. Less likely reasons are “No such file or directory” or “No such device
or address.” For either of these reasons, likely causes are:

■ The Veritas Volume Manager package installation did not complete

correctly.
■ The device node was removed by the administrator or by an errant
shell script.
■ Action: If the reason is “Device is already open,” stop or kill the old
vxconfigd by running the command:
# vxdctl -k stop
For other failure reasons, consider re-adding the base Veritas Volume
Manager package. This will reconfigure the device node and re-install the
Veritas Volume Manager kernel device drivers. See the Installation Guide
for information on how to add the package. If you cannot re-add the
package, contact Veritas Technical Support for more information.
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-169 Cannot open /etc/vfstab: reason
■ Description: vxconfigd could not open the /etc/vfstab file, for the
reason given. The /etc/vfstab file is used to determine which volume (if
any) to use for the /usr file system.
■ Action: This error implies that your root file system is currently unusable.
You may be able to repair the root file system by mounting it after booting
from a network or CD-ROM root file system. If the root file system is
defined on a volume, then see the procedures defined for recovering from a
failed root file system in “Recovery from boot disk failure” on page 35.
 Error messages 93
Understanding messages

V-5-1-249
VxVM vxconfigd NOTICE V-5-1-249 Volume volume entering degraded mode
■ Description: Detaching a subdisk in the named RAID-5 volume has caused
the volume to enter “degraded” mode. While in degraded mode,
performance of the RAID-5 volume is substantially reduced. More
importantly, failure of another subdisk may leave the RAID-5 volume
unusable. Also, if the RAID-5 volume does not have an active log, then
failure of the system may leave the volume unusable.
■ Action: If hot-relocation is enabled, Veritas Volume Manager objects affected
by the disk failure are taken care of automatically. Mail is sent to root
indicating what actions were taken by VxVM and what further actions the
administrator should take.

V-5-1-480
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-480 Cannot reset VxVM kernel: reason
■ Description: The -r reset option was specified to vxconfigd, but the
VxVM kernel drivers could not be reset. The most common reason is “A
virtual disk device is open.” This implies that a VxVM tracing or volume
device is open.
■ Action: If you want to reset the kernel devices, track down and kill all
processes that have a volume or Veritas Volume Manager tracing device
open. Also, if any volumes are mounted as file systems, unmount those file
systems.
Any reason other than “A virtual disk device is open” does not normally
occur unless there is a bug in the operating system or in VxVM.

V-5-1-484
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-484 Cannot start volume volume, no valid
complete plexes
■ Description: These errors indicate that the volume cannot be started
because the volume contains no valid complete plexes. This can happen, for
example, if disk failures have caused all plexes to be unusable. It can also
happen as a result of actions that caused all plexes to become unusable (for
example, forcing the dissociation of subdisks or detaching, dissociation, or
offlining of plexes).
94 Error messages
Understanding messages

■ Action: It is possible that this error results from a drive that failed to spin
up. If so, rebooting may fix the problem. If that does not fix the problem,
then the only recourse is to repair the disks involved with the plexes and
restore the file system from a backup. Restoring the root or /usr file
system requires that you have a valid backup. See “Repairing root or /usr
file systems on mirrored volumes” on page 45 for information on how to fix
problems with root or /usr file system volumes.

V-5-1-485
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-485 Cannot start volume volume, volume
state is invalid
■ Description: The volume for the root or /usr file system is in an
unexpected state (not ACTIVE, CLEAN, SYNC or NEEDSYNC). This should
not happen unless the system administrator circumvents the mechanisms
used by VxVM to create these volumes.
■ Action: The only recourse is to bring up VxVM on a CD-ROM or NFS-
mounted root file system and to fix the state of the volume. See“Repairing
root or /usr file systems on mirrored volumes” on page 45 for further
information.

V-5-1-525
VxVM vxconfigd NOTICE V-5-1-525 Detached log for volume volume
■ Description: The DRL or RAID-5 log for the named volume was detached as a
result of a disk failure, or as a result of the administrator removing a disk
with vxdg -k rmdisk. A failing disk is indicated by a “Detached disk”
message.
■ Action: If the log is mirrored, hot-relocation tries to relocate the failed log
automatically. Use either vxplex dis or vxsd dis to remove the failing
logs. Then, use vxassist addlog (see the vxassist(1M) manual page) to
add a new log to the volume.

V-5-1-526
VxVM vxconfigd NOTICE V-5-1-526 Detached plex plex in volume volume
■ Description: The specified plex was disabled as a result of a disk failure, or as
a result of the administrator removing a disk with vxdg -k rmdisk. A
failing disk is indicated by a “Detached disk” message.
 Error messages 95
Understanding messages

■ Action: If hot-relocation is enabled, Veritas Volume Manager objects affected

by the disk failure are taken care of automatically. Mail is sent to root
indicating what actions were taken by VxVM and what further actions the
administrator should take.

V-5-1-527
VxVM vxconfigd NOTICE V-5-1-527 Detached subdisk subdisk in volume
volume
■ Description: The specified subdisk was disabled as a result of a disk failure,
or as a result of the administrator removing a disk with vxdg -k rmdisk. A
failing disk is indicated by a “Detached disk” message.
■ Action: If hot-relocation is enabled, Veritas Volume Manager objects affected
by the disk failure are taken care of automatically. Mail is sent to root
indicating what actions were taken by VxVM and what further actions the
administrator should take.

V-5-1-528
VxVM vxconfigd NOTICE V-5-1-528 Detached volume volume
■ Description: The specified volume was detached as a result of a disk failure,
or as a result of the administrator removing a disk with vxdg -k rmdisk. A
failing disk is indicated by a “Detached disk” message. Unless the disk error
is transient and can be fixed with a reboot, the contents of the volume
should be considered lost.
■ Action: Contact Veritas Technical Support.

V-5-1-543
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-543 Differing version of vxconfigd

installed

■ Description: A vxconfigd daemon was started after stopping an earlier

vxconfigd with a non-matching version number. This can happen, for
example, if you upgrade VxVM and then run vxconfigd without first
rebooting.
■ Action: Reboot the system.
96 Error messages
Understanding messages

V-5-1-544
VxVM vxconfigd WARNING V-5-1-544 Disk disk in group group flagged as
shared; Disk skipped
■ Description: The given disk is listed as shared, but the running version of
VxVM does not support shared disk groups.
■ Action: This message can usually be ignored. If you want to use the disk on
this system, use vxdiskadd to add the disk. Do not do this if the disk really
is shared with other systems.

V-5-1-545
VxVM vxconfigd WARNING V-5-1-545 Disk disk in group group locked by
host hostid Disk skipped
■ Description: The given disk is listed as locked by the host with the Veritas
Volume Manager host ID (usually the same as the system host name).
■ Action: This message can usually be ignored. If you want to use the disk on
this system, use vxdiskadd to add the disk. Do not do this if the disk really
is shared with other systems.

V-5-1-546
VxVM vxconfigd WARNING V-5-1-546 Disk disk in group group: Disk device
not found
■ Description: No physical disk can be found that matches the named disk in
the given disk group. This is equivalent to failure of that disk. (Physical disks
are located by matching the disk IDs in the disk group configuration records
against the disk IDs stored in the Veritas Volume Manager header on the
physical disks.) This error message is displayed for any disk IDs in the
configuration that are not located in the disk header of any physical disk.
This may result from a transient failure such as a poorly-attached cable, or
from a disk that fails to spin up fast enough. Alternately, this may happen as
a result of a disk being physically removed from the system, or from a disk
that has become unusable due to a head crash or electronics failure.
Any RAID-5 plexes, DRL log plexes, RAID-5 subdisks or mirrored plexes
containing subdisks on this disk are unusable. Such disk failures
(particularly on multiple disks) may cause one or more volumes to become
unusable.
■ Action: If hot-relocation is enabled, Veritas Volume Manager objects affected
by the disk failure are taken care of automatically. Mail is sent to root
indicating what actions were taken by VxVM and what further actions the
administrator should take.
 Error messages 97
Understanding messages

V-5-1-554
VxVM vxconfigd WARNING V-5-1-554 Disk disk names group group, but
group ID differs
■ Description: As part of a disk group import, a disk was discovered that had a
mismatched disk group name and disk group ID. This disk is not imported.
This can only happen if two disk groups have the same name but have
different disk group ID values. In such a case, one group is imported along
with all its disks and the other group is not. This message appears for disks
in the un-selected group.
■ Action: If the disks should be imported into the group, this must be done by
adding the disk to the group at a later stage, during which all configuration
information for the disk is lost.

V-5-1-557
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-557 Disk disk, group group, device device:

not updated with new host ID

Error: reason

■ Description: This can result from using vxdctl hostid to change the
Veritas Volume Manager host ID for the system. The error indicates that one
of the disks in a disk group could not be updated with the new host ID. This
usually indicates that the disk has become inaccessible or has failed in some
other way.
■ Action: Try running the following command to determine whether the disk
is still operational:
# vxdisk check device
If the disk is no longer operational, vxdisk should print a message such as:
device: Error: Disk write failure
This will result in the disk being taken out of active use in its disk group, if it
has not already been taken out of use. If the disk is still operational, which
should not be the case, vxdisk prints:
device: Okay
If the disk is listed as “Okay,” try running vxdctl hostid again. If it still
results in an error, contact Veritas Technical Support.
98 Error messages
Understanding messages

V-5-1-568
VxVM vxconfigd WARNING V-5-1-568 Disk group group is disabled, disks
not updated with new host ID
■ Description: As a result of failures, the named disk group has become
disabled. Earlier error messages should indicate the cause. This message
indicates that disks in that disk group were not updated with a new Veritas
Volume Manager host ID. This warning message should result only from a
vxdctl hostid operation.
■ Action: Typically, unless a disk group was disabled due to transient errors,
there is no way to repair a disabled disk group. The disk group may have to
be reconstructed from scratch. If the disk group was disabled due to a
transient error such as a cabling problem, then a future reboot may not
automatically import the named disk group, due to the change in the
system’s Veritas Volume Manager host ID. In such a case, import the disk
group directly using vxdg import with the -C option.

V-5-1-569
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-569 Disk group group,Disk disk:Cannot auto-
import group: reason
■ Description: On system startup, vxconfigd failed to import the disk group
associated with the named disk. A message related to the specific failure is
given in reason. Additional error messages may be displayed that give more
information on the specific error. In particular, this is often followed by:
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-579 Disk group group: Errors in some

configuration copies:

Disk device, copy number: Block bno: error ...

The most common reason for auto-import failures is excessive numbers of

disk failures, making it impossible for VxVM to find correct copies of the
disk group configuration database and kernel update log. Disk groups
usually have enough copies of this configuration information to make such
import failures unlikely.
A more serious failure is indicated by errors such as:
Configuration records are inconsistent

Disk group has no valid configuration copies

Duplicate record in configuration

Format error in configuration copy

Invalid block number

Invalid magic number

These errors indicate that all configuration copies have become corrupt
(due to disk failures, writing on the disk by an application or the
administrator, or bugs in VxVM).
 Error messages 99
Understanding messages

Some correctable errors may be indicated by other error messages that

appear in conjunction with the auto-import failure message. Look up those
other errors for more information on their cause.
Failure of an auto-import implies that the volumes in that disk group will
not be available for use. If there are file systems on those volumes, then the
system may yield further errors resulting from inability to access the
volume when mounting the file system.
■ Action: If the error is clearly caused by excessive disk failures, then you may
have to recreate the disk group configuration by using the procedures given
in “Restoring a disk group configuration” on page 71, and restore contents
of any volumes from a backup. There may be other error messages that
appear which provide further information. See those other error messages
for more information on how to proceed. If those errors do not make it clear
how to proceed, contact Veritas Technical Support.

V-5-1-571
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-571 Disk group group, Disk disk: Skip disk
group with duplicate name
■ Description: Two disk groups with the same name are tagged for auto-
importing by the same host. Disk groups are identified both by a simple
name and by a long unique identifier (disk group ID) assigned when the disk
group is created. Thus, this error indicates that two disks indicate the same
disk group name but a different disk group ID.
VxVM does not allow you to create a disk group or import a disk group from
another machine, if that would cause a collision with a disk group that is
already imported. Therefore, this error is unlikely to occur under normal
use. However, this error can occur in the following two cases:
■ A disk group cannot be auto-imported due to some temporary failure. If
you create a new disk group with the same name as the failed disk
group and reboot, the new disk group is imported first. The auto-import
of the older disk group fails because more recently modified disk
groups have precedence over older disk groups.
■ A disk group is deported from one host using the -h option to cause the
disk group to be auto-imported on reboot from another host. If the
second host was already auto-importing a disk group with the same
name, then reboot of that host will yield this error.
■ Action: If you want to import both disk groups, then rename the second disk
group on import. See the vxdg(1M) manual page for information on how to
use the import operation to rename a disk group.
100 Error messages
Understanding messages

V-5-1-577
VxVM vxconfigd WARNING V-5-1-577 Disk group group: Disk group log may

be too small

Log size should be at least number blocks

■ Description: The log areas for the disk group have become too small for the
size of configuration currently in the group. This message only occurs
during disk group import; it can only occur if the disk was inaccessible while
new database objects were added to the configuration, and the disk was then
made accessible and the system restarted. This should not normally happen
without first displaying a message about the database area size.
■ Action: Reinitialize the disks in the group with larger log areas. Note that
this requires that you restore data on the disks from backups. See the
vxdisk(1M) manual page. To reinitialize all of the disks, detach them from
the group with which they are associated, reinitialize and re-add them. Then
deport and re-import the disk group to effect the changes to the log areas for
the group.

V-5-1-579
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-579 Disk group group: Errors in some
configuration copies: Disk disk, copy number: [Block number]: reason
...
■ Description: During a failed disk group import, some of the configuration
copies in the named disk group were found to have format or other types of
errors which make those copies unusable. This message lists all
configuration copies that have uncorrected errors, including any
appropriate logical block number. If no other reasons are displayed, then
this may be the cause of the disk group import failure.
■ Action: If some of the copies failed due to transient errors (such as cable
failures), then a reboot or re-import may succeed in importing the disk
group. Otherwise, the disk group configuration may have to be restored. You
can recreate a disk group configuration by using the procedures given in
“Restoring a disk group configuration” on page 71

V-5-1-583
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-583 Disk group group: Reimport of disk
group failed: reason
■ Description: After vxconfigd was stopped and restarted (or disabled and
then enabled), VxVM failed to recreate the import of the indicated disk
group. The reason for failure is specified. Additional error messages may be
displayed that give further information describing the problem.
 Error messages 101
Understanding messages

■ Action: A major cause for this kind of failure is disk failures that were not
addressed before vxconfigd was stopped or disabled. If the problem is a
transient disk failure, then rebooting may take care of the condition. The
error may be accompanied by messages such as ‘‘Disk group has no valid
configuration copies.’’ This indicates that the disk group configuration
copies have become corrupt (due to disk failures, writing on the disk by an
application or the administrator, or bugs in VxVM). You can recreate a disk
group configuration by using the procedures given in “Restoring a disk
group configuration” on page 71.

V-5-1-587
VxVM vxdg ERROR V-5-1-587 disk group groupname: import failed:

reason

■ Description: The import of a disk group failed for the specified reason.
■ Action: The action to be taken depends on the reason given in the error
message:
Disk is in use by another host
No valid disk found containing disk group
The first message indicates that disks have been moved from a system that
has crashed or that failed to detect the group before the disk was moved.
The locks stored on the disks must be cleared.
The second message indicates that the disk group does not contain any
valid disks (not that it does not contain any disks). The disks may be
considered invalid due to a mismatch between the host ID in their
configuration copies and that stored in the /etc/vx/volboot file.
To clear locks on a specific set of devices, use the following command:
# vxdisk clearimport devicename ...
To clear the locks during import, use the following command:
# vxdg -C import diskgroup

Caution: Be careful when using the vxdisk clearimport or vxdg -C import

command on systems that have dual-ported disks. Clearing the locks allows
those disks to be accessed at the same time from multiple hosts and can
result in corrupted data.

An import operation fails if some disks for the disk group cannot be found
among the disk drives attached to the system.
Disk for disk group not found

Disk group has no valid configuration copies

The first message indicates a recoverable error.
102 Error messages
Understanding messages

The second message indicates a fatal error that requires hardware repair or
the creation of a new disk group, and recovery of the disk group
configuration and data:
If some of the disks in the disk group have failed, you can force the disk
group to be imported with this command:
# vxdg -f import diskgroup

Caution: Be careful when using the -f option. It can cause the same disk
group to be imported twice from different sets of disks. This can cause the
disk group configuration to become inconsistent.

As using the -f option to force the import of an incomplete disk group

counts as a successful import, an incomplete disk group may be imported
subsequently without this option being specified. This may not be what you
expect.

These operations can also be performed using the vxdiskadm utility. To

deport a disk group using vxdiskadm, select menu item 9 (Remove access
to (deport) a disk group). To import a disk group, select item 8
(Enable access to (import) a disk group). The vxdiskadm
import operation checks for host import locks and prompts to see if you
want to clear any that are found. It also starts volumes in the disk group.

V-5-1-663
VxVM vxconfigd WARNING V-5-1-663 Group group: Duplicate virtual

device number(s):

Volume volume remapped from major,minor to major,minor ...

■ Description: The configuration of the named disk group includes conflicting

device numbers. A disk group configuration lists the recommended device
number to use for each volume in the disk group. If two volumes in two disk
groups happen to list the same device number, then one of the volumes
must use an alternate device number. This is called device number
remapping. Remapping is a temporary change to a volume. If the other disk
group is deported and the system is rebooted, then the volume that was
remapped may no longer be remapped. Also, volumes that are remapped
once are not guaranteed to be remapped to the same device number in
further reboots.
■ Action: Use the vxdg reminor command to renumber all volumes in the
offending disk group permanently. See the vxdg(1M) manual page for more
information.
 Error messages 103
Understanding messages

V-5-1-737
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-737 Mount point path: volume not in bootdg
disk group
■ Description: The volume device listed in the /etc/vfstab file for the
given mount-point directory (normally /usr) is listed as in a disk group
other than the boot disk group. This error should not occur if the standard
Veritas Volume Manager procedures are used for encapsulating the disk
containing the /usr file system.
■ Action: Boot VxVM from a network or CD-ROM mounted root file system.
Then, start up VxVM using fixmountroot on a valid mirror disk of the root
file system. After starting VxVM, mount the root file system volume and
edit the /etc/vfstab file. Change the file to use a direct partition for the
file system. There should be a comment in the /etc/vfstab file that
indicates which partition to use.

V-5-1-768
VxVM vxconfigd NOTICE V-5-1-768 Offlining config copy number on disk
disk: Reason: reason
■ Description: An I/O error caused the indicated configuration copy to be
disabled. This is a notice only, and does not normally imply serious
problems, unless this is the last active configuration copy in the disk group.
■ Action: Consider replacing the indicated disk, since this error implies that
the disk has deteriorated to the point where write errors cannot be repaired
automatically. The error can also result from transient problems with
cabling or power.

V-5-1-809
VxVM vxplex ERROR V-5-1-809 Plex plex in volume volume is locked by
another utility.
■ Description: The vxplex command fails because a previous operation to
attach a plex did not complete. The vxprint command should show that one
or both of the temporary and persistent utility fields (TUTIL0 and PUTIL0)
of the volume and one of its plexes are set.
■ Action: If the vxtask list command does not show a task running for the
volume, use the vxmend command to clear the TUTIL0 and PUTIL0 fields for
the volume and all its components for which these fields are set:
# vxmend -g diskgroup clear all volume plex ...
104 Error messages
Understanding messages

V-5-1-923
VxVM vxplex ERROR V-5-1-923 Record volume is in disk group
diskgroup1 plex is in group diskgroup2.
■ Description: An attempt was made to snap back a plex from a different disk
group.
■ Action: Move the snapshot volume into the same disk group as the original
volume.

V-5-1-946
VxVM vxconfigd FATAL ERROR V-5-1-946 bootdg cannot be imported

during boot

■ Description: Usually means that multipathing is misconfigured.

■ Action: See “V-5-1-5929” on page 122 for possible causes and solutions.

V-5-1-1049
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-1049 System boot disk does not have a

valid rootvol plex

Please boot from one of the following disks:

DISK MEDIA DEVICE BOOT COMMAND

diskname device boot vx-diskname...

■ Description: The system is configured to use a volume for the root file
system, but was not booted on a disk containing a valid mirror of the root
volume. Disks containing valid root mirrors are listed as part of the error
message. A disk is usable as a boot disk if there is a root mirror on that disk
which is not stale or offline.
■ Action: Try to boot from one of the named disks using the associated boot
command that is listed in the message.

V-5-1-1063
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-1063 There is no volume configured for

the root device

■ Description: The system is configured to boot from a root file system

defined on a volume, but there is no root volume listed in the configuration
of the boot disk group.
There are two possible causes of this error:
■ Case 1: The /etc/system file was erroneously updated to indicate that
the root device is /pseudo/vxio@0:0. This can happen only as a
result of direct manipulation by the administrator.
 Error messages 105
Understanding messages

■ Case 2: The system somehow has a duplicate boot disk group, one of
which contains a root file system volume and one of which does not,
and vxconfigd somehow chose the wrong one. Since vxconfigd
chooses the more recently accessed version of the boot disk group, this
error can happen if the system clock was updated incorrectly at some
point (reversing the apparent access order of the two disk groups). This
can also happen if some disk group was deported and assigned the
same name as the boot disk group with locks given to this host.
■ Action: In case 1, boot the system on a CD-ROM or networking-mounted root
file system, directly mount the disk partition of the root file system, and
remove the following lines from /etc/system:
rootdev:/pseudo/vxio@0:0

set vxio:vol_rootdev_is_volume=1

In case 2, either boot with all drives in the offending version of the boot disk
group turned off, or import and rename (see vxdg(1M)) the offending boot
disk group from another host. If you turn off the drives, run the following
command after booting:
# vxdg flush bootdg

This updates time stamps on the imported version of the specified boot disk
group, bootdg, which should make the correct version appear to be the more
recently accessed. If this does not correct the problem, contact Veritas
Technical Support.

V-5-1-1171
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-1171 Version number of kernel does not

match vxconfigd

■ Description: The release of vxconfigd does not match the release of the
Veritas Volume Manager kernel drivers. This should happen only as a result
of upgrading VxVM, and then running vxconfigd without a reboot.
■ Action: Reboot the system. If that does not cure the problem, re-add the
VxVM packages.

V-5-1-1186
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-1186 Volume volume for mount point /usr
not found in bootdg disk group
■ Description: The system is configured to boot with /usr mounted on a
volume, but the volume associated with /usr is not listed in the
configuration of the boot disk group. There are two possible causes of this
error:
106 Error messages
Understanding messages

■ Case 1: The /etc/vfstab file was erroneously updated to indicate the

device for the /usr file system is a volume, but the volume named is
not in the boot disk group. This should happen only as a result of direct
manipulation by the administrator.
■ Case 2: The system somehow has a duplicate boot disk group, one of
which contains the /usr file system volume and one of which does not
(or uses a different volume name), and vxconfigd somehow chose the
wrong boot disk group. Since vxconfigd chooses the more recently
accessed version of the boot disk group, this error can happen if the
system clock was updated incorrectly at some point (causing the
apparent access order of the two disk groups to be reversed). This can
also happen if some disk group was deported and assigned the same
name as the boot disk group with locks given to this host.
■ Action: In case 1, boot the system on a CD-ROM or networking-mounted
root file system. If the root file system is defined on a volume, then start
and mount the root volume. If the root file system is not defined on a
volume, mount the root file system directly. Edit the /etc/vfstab file to
correct the entry for the /usr file system.
In case 2, either boot with all drives in the offending version of the boot disk
group turned off, or import and rename (see vxdg(1M)) the offending boot
disk group from another host. If you turn off drives, run the following
command after booting:
# vxdg flush bootdg
This updates time stamps on the imported version of the boot disk group,
bootdg, which should make the correct version appear to be the more
recently accessed. If this does not correct the problem, contact Veritas
Technical Support.

V-5-1-1589
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-1589 enable failed: aborting

■ Description: Regular startup of vxconfigd failed. This error can also result
from the command vxdctl enable.
■ Action: The failure was fatal and vxconfigd was forced to exit. The most
likely cause is that the operating system is unable to create interprocess
communication channels to other utilities.
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-1589 enable failed: Error check group

configuration copies. Database file not found

■ Description: Regular startup of vxconfigd failed. This error can also result
from the command vxdctl enable.
The directory /var/vxvm/tempdb is inaccessible. This may be because of
root file system corruption, if the root file system is full, or if /var is a
 Error messages 107
Understanding messages

separate file system, because it has become corrupted or has not been
mounted.
■ Action: If the root file system is full, increase its size or remove files to
make space for the tempdb file.
If /var is a separate file system, make sure that it has an entry in /etc/
vfstab. Otherwise, look for I/O error messages during the boot process
that indicate either a hardware problem or misconfiguration of any logical
volume management software being used for the /var file system. Also
verify that the encapsulation (if configured) of your boot disk is complete
and correct.
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-1589 enable failed: transactions are
disabled
■ Description: Regular startup of vxconfigd failed. This error can also result
from the command vxdctl enable.
vxconfigd is continuing to run, but no configuration updates are possible
until the error condition is repaired.
Additionally, this may be followed with:
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-579 Disk group group: Errors in some

configuration copies:

Disk device, copy number: Block bno: error ...

Other error messages may be displayed that further indicate the underlying
problem.
■ Action: Evaluate the error messages to determine the root cause of the
problem. Make changes suggested by the errors and then try rerunning the
command.
If the “Errors in some configuration copies” error occurs again, that may
indicate the real problem lies with the configuration copies in the disk
group. You can recreate a disk group configuration by using the procedures
given in “Restoring a disk group configuration” on page 71.

V-5-1-2020
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-2020 Cannot kill existing daemon,
pid=process_ID
■ Description: The -k (kill existing vxconfigd process) option was specified,
but a running configuration daemon process could not be killed. A
configuration daemon process, for purposes of this discussion, is any
process that opens the /dev/vx/config device (only one process can open
that device at a time). If there is a configuration daemon process already
running, then the -k option causes a SIGKILL signal to be sent to that
process. If, within a certain period of time, there is still a running
configuration daemon process, the above error message is displayed.
108 Error messages
Understanding messages

■ Action: This error can result from a kernel error that has made the
configuration daemon process unkillable, from some other kind of kernel
error, or from some other user starting another configuration daemon
process after the SIGKILL signal. This last condition can be tested for by
running vxconfigd -k again. If the error message reappears, contact
Veritas Technical Support.

V-5-1-2197
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-2197 node N: missing vxconfigd
■ Description: The vxconfigd daemon is not running on the indicated
cluster node.
■ Action: Restart the vxconfigd daemon.

V-5-1-2198
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-2198 node N: vxconfigd not ready
■ Description: The vxconfigd daemon is not responding properly in a
cluster.
■ Action: Stop and restart the vxconfigd daemon on the node indicated.

V-5-1-2274
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-2274 volume:vxconfigd cannot boot-start
RAID-5 volumes
■ Description: A volume that vxconfigd should start immediately upon
booting the system (that is, the volume for the /usr file system) has a RAID-
5 layout. The /usr file system should never be defined on a RAID-5 volume.
■ Action: It is likely that the only recovery for this is to boot VxVM from a
network-mounted root file system (or from a CD-ROM), and reconfigure the
/usr file system to be defined on a regular non-RAID-5 volume.

V-5-1-2290
VxVM vxdmpadm ERROR V-5-1-2290 Attempt to enable a controller that

is not available

■ Description: This message is returned by the vxdmpadm utility when an

attempt is made to enable a controller that is not working or is not
physically present.
■ Action: Check hardware and see if the controller is present and whether I/O
can be performed through it.
 Error messages 109
Understanding messages

V-5-1-2353
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-2353 Disk group group: Cannot recover temp

database: reason

Consider use of "vxconfigd -x cleartempdir" [see vxconfigd(1M)].

■ Description: This can happen if you kill and restart vxconfigd, or if you
disable and enable it with vxdctl disable and vxdctl enable. This
error indicates a failure related to reading the file /var/vxvm/tempdb/
group. This is a temporary file used to store information that is used when
recovering the state of an earlier vxconfigd. The file is recreated on a
reboot, so this error should never survive a reboot.
■ Action: If you can reboot, do so. If you do not want to reboot, then do the
following:
1 Ensure that no vxvol, vxplex, or vxsd processes are running.
Use ps -e to search for such processes, and use kill to kill any that
you find. You may have to run kill twice to make these processes go
away. Killing utilities in this way may make it difficult to make
administrative changes to some volumes until the system is rebooted.
2 Recreate the temporary database files for all imported disk groups
using the following command:
# vxconfigd -x cleartempdir 2> /dev/console
The vxvol, vxplex, and vxsd commands make use of these tempdb
files to communicate locking information. If the file is cleared, then
locking information can be lost. Without this locking information, two
utilities can end up making incompatible changes to the configuration
of a volume.

V-5-1-2524
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1:2524 VOL_IO_DAEMON_SET failed: daemon
count must be above N while cluster
■ Description: The number of Veritas Volume Manager kernel daemons
(vxiod) is less than the minimum number needed to join a cluster.
■ Action: Increase the number of daemons using vxiod.

V-5-1-2630
VxVM vxconfigd WARNING V-5-1-2630 library and vxconfigd disagree on
existence of client number
■ Description: This warning may safely be ignored.
■ Action: None required.
110 Error messages
Understanding messages

V-5-1-2824
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-2824 Configuration daemon error 242

■ Description: A node failed to join a cluster, or a cluster join is taking too long.
If the join fails, the node retries the join automatically.
■ Action: No action is necessary if the join is slow or a retry eventually
succeeds.

V-5-1-2829
VxVM vxdg ERROR V-5-1-2829 diskgroup: Disk group version doesn’t
support feature; see the vxdg upgrade command
■ Description: The version of the specified disk group does not support disk
group move, split or join operations.
■ Action: Use the vxdg upgrade diskgroup command to update the disk group
version.

V-5-1-2830
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-2830 Disk reserved by other host

■ Description: An attempt was made to online a disk whose controller has

been reserved by another host in the cluster.
■ Action: No action is necessary. The cluster manager frees the disk and VxVM
puts it online when the node joins the cluster.

V-5-1-2841
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-2841 enable failed: Error in disk group

configuration copies

Unexpected kernel error in configuration update; transactions are

disabled.

■ Description: Usually means that multipathing is misconfigured.

■ Action: See “V-5-1-5929” on page 122 for possible causes and solutions.

V-5-1-2860
VxVM vxdg ERROR V-5-1-2860 Transaction already in progress

■ Description: One of the disk groups specified in a disk group move, split or
join operation is currently involved in another unrelated disk group move,
split or join operation (possibly as the result of recovery from a system
failure).
 Error messages 111
Understanding messages

■ Action: Use the vxprint command to display the status of the disk groups
involved. If vxprint shows that the TUTIL0 field for a disk group is set to
MOVE, and you are certain that no disk group move, split or join should be
in progress, use the vxdg command to clear the field as described in
“Recovering from incomplete disk group moves” on page 24. Otherwise,
retry the operation.

V-5-1-2862
VxVM vxdg ERROR V-5-1-2862 object: Operation is not supported
■ Description: DCO and snap objects dissociated by Persistent FastResync, and
VVR objects cannot be moved between disk groups.
■ Action: None. The operation is not supported.

V-5-1-2866
VxVM vxdg ERROR V-5-1-2866 object: Record already exists in disk group
■ Description: A disk group join operation failed because the name of an object
in one disk group is the same as the name of an object in the other disk
group. Such name clashes are most likely to occur for snap objects and
snapshot plexes.
■ Action: Use the following command to change the object name in either one
of the disk groups:
# vxedit -g diskgroup rename old_name new_name
For more information about using the vxedit command, see the
vxedit(1M) manual page.

V-5-1-2870
VxVM vxdg ERROR V-5-1-2870 volume: Volume or plex device is open or
mounted
■ Description: An attempt was made to perform a disk group move, split or
join on a disk group containing an open volume.
■ Action: It is most likely that a file system configured on the volume is still
mounted. Stop applications that access volumes configured in the disk
group, and unmount any file systems configured in the volumes.
112 Error messages
Understanding messages

V-5-1-2879
VxVM vxdg ERROR V-5-1-2879 subdisk: Record is associated
■ Description: The named subdisk is not a top-level object.
■ Action: Objects specified for a disk group move, split or join must be either
disks or top-level volumes.

V-5-1-2907

VxVM vxdg ERROR V-5-1-2907 diskgroup: Disk group does not exist

■ Description: The disk group does not exist or is not imported

■ Action: Use the correct name, or import the disk group and try again.

V-5-1-2908
VxVM vxdg ERROR V-5-1-2908 diskdevice: Request crosses disk group
boundary
■ Description: The specified disk device is not configured in the source disk
group for a disk group move or split operation.
■ Action: Correct the name of the disk object specified in the disk group move
or split operation.

V-5-1-2911
VxVM vxdg ERROR V-5-1-2911 diskname: Disk is not usable
■ Description: The specified disk has become unusable.
■ Action: Do not include the disk in any disk group move, split or join
operation until it has been replaced or repaired.

V-5-1-2922
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-2922 Disk group exists and is imported

■ Description: A slave tried to join a cluster, but a shared disk group already
exists in the cluster with the same name as one of its private disk groups.
■ Action: Use the vxdg -n newname import diskgroup operation to
rename either the shared disk group on the master, or the private disk group
on the slave.
 Error messages 113
Understanding messages

V-5-1-2928
VxVM vxdg ERROR V-5-1-2928 diskgroup: Configuration too large for
configuration copies
■ Description: The disk group’s configuration database is too small to hold the
expanded configuration after a disk group move or join operation.
■ Action: None.

V-5-1-2933
VxVM vxdg ERROR V-5-1-2933 diskgroup: Cannot remove last disk group
configuration copy
■ Description: The requested disk group move, split or join operation would
leave the disk group without any configuration copies.
■ Action: None. The operation is not supported.

V-5-1-2935
VxVM vxassist ERROR V-5-1-2935 No more space in disk group

configuration.

■ Description: There is no more space in the disk group’s configuration

database for VxVM object records.
■ Action: Copy the contents of several volumes to another disk group and then
delete the volumes from this disk group, or use the disk group split/join
feature to move the volumes to another disk group. To avoid the problem in
the future, do not create more than a few hundred volumes in a disk group,
or specify a larger size for the private region when adding disks to a new
disk group.

V-5-1-3009
VxVM vxdg ERROR V-5-1-3009 object: Name conflicts with imported
diskgroup
■ Description: The target disk group of a split operation already exists as an
imported disk group.
■ Action: Choose a different name for the target disk group.
114 Error messages
Understanding messages

V-5-1-3020
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-3020 Error in cluster processing

■ Description: This may be due to an operation inconsistent with the current

state of a cluster (such as an attempt to import or deport a shared disk group
to or from the slave). It may also be caused by an unexpected sequence of
commands from vxclust.
■ Action: Perform the operation from the master node.

V-5-1-3022
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-3022 Cannot find disk on slave node

■ Description: A slave node in a cluster cannot find a shared disk. This is

accompanied by the syslog message:
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-2173 cannot find disk disk
■ Action: Make sure that the same set of shared disks is online on both nodes.
Examine the disks on both the master and the slave with the command
vxdisk list and make sure that the same set of disks with the shared
flag is visible on both nodes. If not, check the connections to the disks.

V-5-1-3023
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-3023 Disk in use by another cluster

■ Description: An attempt was made to import a disk group whose disks are
stamped with the ID of another cluster.
■ Action: If the disk group is not imported by another cluster, retry the import
using the -C (clear import) flag.

V-5-1-3024
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-3024 vxclust not there

■ Description: An error during an attempt to join a cluster caused vxclust to

fail. This may be caused by the failure of another node during a join or by
the failure of vxclust.
■ Action: Retry the join. An error message on the other node may clarify the
problem.
 Error messages 115
Understanding messages

V-5-1-3025
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-3025 Unable to add portal for cluster

■ Description: vxconfigd was not able to create a portal for communication

with the vxconfigd on the other node. This may happen in a degraded
system that is experiencing shortages of system resources such as memory
or file descriptors.
■ Action: If the system does not appear to be degraded, stop and restart
vxconfigd, and try again.

V-5-1-3030
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-3030 Volume recovery in progress

■ Description: A node that crashed attempted to rejoin the cluster before its
DRL map was merged into the recovery map.
■ Action: Retry the join when the merge operation has completed.

V-5-1-3031
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-3031 Cannot assign minor minor
■ Description: A slave attempted to join a cluster, but an existing volume on
the slave has the same minor number as a shared volume on the master.
This message is accompanied by the following console message:
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-2192 minor number minor disk group

group in use

■ Action: Before retrying the join, use vxdg reminor (see the vxdg(1M)
manual page) to choose a new minor number range either for the disk group
on the master or for the conflicting disk group on the slave. If there are open
volumes in the disk group, the reminor operation will not take effect until
the disk group is deported and updated (either explicitly or by rebooting the
system).

V-5-1-3032
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-3032 Master sent no data

■ Description: During the slave join protocol, a message without data was
received from the master. This message is only likely to be seen in the case
of an internal VxVM error.
■ Action: Contact Veritas Technical Support.
116 Error messages
Understanding messages

V-5-1-3033
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-3033 Join in progress

■ Description: An attempt was made to import or deport a shared disk group

during a cluster reconfiguration.
■ Action: Retry when the cluster reconfiguration has completed.

V-5-1-3034
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-3034 Join not currently allowed

■ Description: A slave attempted to join a cluster when the master was not
ready. The slave will retry automatically.
■ Action: No action is necessary if the join eventually completes. Otherwise,
investigate the cluster monitor on the master.

V-5-1-3042
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-3042 Clustering license restricts

operation

■ Description: An operation requiring a full clustering license was attempted,

and such a license is not available.
■ Action: If the error occurs when a disk group is being activated, dissociate all
but one plex from mirrored volumes before activating the disk group. If the
error occurs during a transaction, deactivate the disk group on all nodes
except the master.

V-5-1-3046
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-3046 Node activation conflict

■ Description: The disk group could not be activated because it is activated in a

conflicting mode on another node in a cluster.
■ Action: Retry later, or deactivate the disk group on conflicting nodes.

V-5-1-3049
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-3049 Retry rolling upgrade

■ Description: An attempt was made to upgrade a cluster to a higher protocol

version when a transaction was in progress.
■ Action: Retry the upgrade at a later time.
 Error messages 117
Understanding messages

V-5-1-3050
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-3050 Version out of range for at least

one node

■ Description: Before trying to upgrade a cluster by running vxdctl

upgrade, all nodes should be able to support the new protocol version. An
upgrade can fail if at least one of them does not support the new protocol
version.
■ Action: Make sure that the Veritas Volume Manager package that supports
the new protocol version is installed on all nodes and retry the upgrade.

V-5-1-3091
VxVM vxdg ERROR V-5-1-3091 diskname : Disk not moving, but subdisks
on it are
■ Description: Some volumes have subdisks that are not on the disks implied
by the supplied list of objects.
■ Action: Use the -o expand option to vxdg listmove to produce a self-
contained list of objects.

V-5-1-3212
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-3212 Insufficient DRL log size: logging

is disabled.

■ Description: A volume with an insufficient DRL log size was started

successfully, but DRL logging is disabled and a full recovery is performed.
■ Action: Create a new DRL of sufficient size.

V-5-1-3243
VxVM vxdmpadm ERROR V-5-1-3243 The VxVM restore daemon is already

running. You can stop and restart the restore daemon with desired

arguments for changing any of its parameters.

■ Description: The vxdmpadm start restore command has been executed

while the restore daemon is already running.
■ Action: Stop the restore daemon and restart it with the required set of
parameters as shown in the vxdmpadm(1M) manual page.
118 Error messages
Understanding messages

V-5-1-3362
VxVM vxdmpadm ERROR V-5-1-3362 Attempt to disable controller failed.

One (or more) devices can be accessed only through this controller.

Use the -f option if you still want to disable this controller.

■ Description: Disabling the controller could lead to some devices becoming

inaccessible.
■ Action: To disable the only path connected to a disk, use the -f option.

V-5-1-3486
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-3486 Not in cluster

■ Description: Checking for the current protocol version (using vxdctl

protocol version) does not work if the node is not in a cluster.
■ Action: Bring the node into the cluster and retry.

V-5-1-3689
VxVM vxassist ERROR V-5-1-3689 Volume record id rid is not found in
the configuration.
■ Description: An error was detected while reattaching a snapshot volume
using snapback. This happens if a volume’s record identifier (rid) changes as
a result of a disk group split that moved the original volume to a new disk
group. The snapshot volume is unable to recognize the original volume
because its record identifier has changed.
■ Action: Use the following command to perform the snapback:
# vxplex [-g diskgroup] -f snapback volume plex

V-5-1-3828
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-3828 upgrade operation failed: Already at

highest version

■ Description: An upgrade operation has failed because a cluster is already

running at the highest protocol version supported by the master.
■ Action: No further action is possible as the master is already running at the
highest protocol version it can support.
 Error messages 119
Understanding messages

V-5-1-3848
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-3848 Incorrect protocol version (number)
in volboot file
■ Description: A node attempted to join a cluster where VxVM software was
incorrectly upgraded or the volboot file is corrupted, possibly by being
edited manually. The volboot file should contain a supported protocol
version before trying to bring the node into the cluster.
■ Action: Verify the supported cluster protocol versions using the vxdctl
protocolversion command. The volboot file should contain a supported
protocol version before trying to bring the node into the cluster. Run
vxdctl init to write a valid protocol version to the volboot file. Restart
vxconfigd and retry the join.

V-5-1-4220
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-4220 DG move: can’t import diskgroup,

giving up

■ Description: The specified disk group cannot be imported during a disk

group move operation. (The disk group ID is obtained from the disk group
that could be imported.)
■ Action: The disk group may have been moved to another host. One option is
to locate it and use the vxdg recover command on both the source and
target disk groups. Specify the -o clean option with one disk group, and the
-o remove option with the other disk group. See “Recovering from
incomplete disk group moves” on page 24 for more information.

V-5-1-4267
VxVM vxassist WARNING V-5-1-4267 volume volume already has at least

one snapshot plex

Snapshot volume created with these plexes will have a dco volume

with no associated dco plex.

■ Description: An error was detected while adding a DCO object and DCO
volume to a mirrored volume. There is at least one snapshot plex already
created on the volume. Because this snapshot plex was created when no DCO
was associated with the volume, there is no DCO plex allocated for it.
■ Action: See the section “Adding a Version 0 DCO and DCO Volume” in the
chapter “Administering Volume Snapshots” of the Veritas Volume Manager
Administrator’s Guide.
120 Error messages
Understanding messages

V-5-1-4277
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-4277 cluster_establish: CVM protocol

version out of range

■ Description: When a node joins a cluster, it tries to join at the protocol

version that is stored in its volboot file. If the cluster is running at a
different protocol version, the master rejects the join and sends the current
protocol version to the slave. The slave re-tries with the current version (if
that version is supported on the joining node), or the join fails.
■ Action: Make sure that the joining node has a Veritas Volume Manager
release installed that supports the current protocol version of the cluster.

V-5-1-4551
VxVM vxconfigd ERROR V-5-1-4551 dg_move_recover: can’t locate

disk(s), giving up

■ Description: Disks involved in a disk group move operation cannot be found,

and one of the specified disk groups cannot be imported.
■ Action: Manual use of the vxdg recover command may be required to clean
the disk group to be imported. See “Recovering from incomplete disk group
moves” on page 24 for more information.

V-5-1-4620
VxVM vxassist WARNING V-5-1-4620 Error while retrieving information

from SAL

■ Description: The vxassist command does not recognize the version of the
SAN Access Layer (SAL) that is being used, or detects an error in the output
from SAL.
■ Action: If a connection to SAL is desired, ensure that the correct version of
SAL is installed and configured correctly. Otherwise, suppress
communication between vxassist and SAL by adding the following line to
the vxassist defaults file (usually /etc/default/vxassist):
salcontact=no

V-5-1-4625
VxVM vxassist WARNING V-5-1-4625 SAL authentication failed...

■ Description: The SAN Access Layer (SAL) rejects the credentials that are
supplied by the vxassist command.
 Error messages 121
Understanding messages

■ Action: If connection to SAL is desired, use the vxspcshow command to set a

valid user name and password. Otherwise, suppress communication
between vxassist and SAL by adding the following line to the vxassist
defaults file (usually /etc/default/vxassist):
salcontact=no

V-5-1-5150
VxVM vxassist ERROR V-5-1-5150 Insufficient number of active

snapshot mirrors in snapshot_volume.

■ Description: An attempt to snap back a specified number of snapshot

mirrors to their original volume failed.
■ Action: Specify a number of snapshot mirrors less than or equal to the
number in the snapshot volume.

V-5-1-5160
VxVM vxplex ERROR V-5-1-5160 Plex plex not associated to a snapshot

volume.

■ Description: An attempt was made to snap back a plex that is not from a
snapshot volume.
■ Action: Specify a plex from a snapshot volume.

V-5-1-5161

VxVM vxplex ERROR V-5-1-5161 Plex plex not attached.

■ Description: An attempt was made to snap back a detached plex.

■ Action: Reattach the snapshot plex to the snapshot volume.

V-5-1-5162
VxVM vxplex ERROR V-5-1-5162 Plexes do not belong to the same

snapshot volume.

■ Description: An attempt was made to snap back plexes that belong to

different snapshot volumes.
■ Action: Specify the plexes in separate invocations of vxplex snapback.
122 Error messages
Understanding messages

V-5-1-5929
VxVM vxconfigd NOTICE V-5-1-5929 Unable to resolve duplicate diskid.

■ Description: VxVM has detected disks with duplicate disk identifiers. Arrays
with mirroring capability in hardware are particularly susceptible to such
data corruption, but other causes are possible as explained below.
In releases prior to 3.5, VxVM selected the first disk that it found if the
selection process failed. From release 3.5, the default behavior of VxVM was
to avoid the selection of the wrong disk as this could lead to data corruption.
If VxVM could not determine which disk was the original, it would not
import the disks until they were reinitialized with a new disk ID.
From release 5.0, VxVM checks the unique disk identifier (UDID) value that
is known to the Device Discovery Layer (DDL) against the UDID value that is
set in the disk’s private region. The udid_mismatch flag is set on the disk
if the values differ. If set, this flag is displayed in the output from the
vxdisk list command.
A new set of vxdisk and vxdg operations are provided to handle such disks;
either by either writing the DDL value of the UDID to a disk’s private region,
or by tagging a disk and specifying that it is a cloned disk to the vxdg import
operation.
■ Action: User intervention is required in the following cases:
■ Case 1: Some arrays such as EMC and HDS provide mirroring in
hardware. When a LUN pair is split, depending on how the process is
performed, this can result in two disks that have the same disk
identifier and UDID value. See ‘‘Handling Disks with Duplicated
Identifiers’’ in the ‘‘Creating and Administering Disk Groups’’ chapter
of the Veritas Volume Manager Administrator’s Guide for full details of
how to deal with this condition.
■ Case 2: If disks have been duplicated by using the dd command or any
similar copying utility, you can use the following command to update
the UDID for one or more disks:
# vxdisk [-f] updateudid disk ...

This command uses the current value of the UDID that is stored in the
Device Discovery Layer (DDL) database to correct the value in the
private region. The -f option must be specified if VxVM has not set the
udid_mismatch flag on a disk.
For example, the following command updates the UDIDs for the disks
c2t66d0s2 and c2t67d0s2:
# vxdisk updateudid c2t66d0s2 c2t67d0s2

■ Case 3: If DMP has been disabled to an array that has multiple paths,
then each path to the array is claimed as a unique disk.
 Error messages 123
Understanding messages

If DMP is suppressed, VxVM does not know which path to select as the
true path. You must choose which path to use. Decide which path to
exclude, and then select item 1 (suppress all paths through a
controller from VxVM’s view) or item 2 (suppress a path
from VxVM’s view) from vxdiskadm option 17 (Prevent
multipathing/Suppress devices from VxVM’s view).
■ Case 4: (Solaris 9 only) After suppressing one path to a multipathed
array from DMP, you then have suppressed that path from VxVM using
item 1 (suppress all paths through a controller from
VxVM’s view) from vxdiskadm option 17 (Prevent multipathing/
Suppress devices from VxVM’s view). If all bootdg disks are from
that array, vxconfigd does not start. (You may also see errors V-5-0-64,
V-5-1-946 and V-5-1-2841.)
If only one array is connected to the controller, suppress the path from
DMP using item 5 (Prevent multipathing of all disks on a
controller by VxVM), and then item 1 (Suppress all paths
through a controller from VxVM’s view), from vxdiskadm
option 17 (Prevent multipathing/Suppress devices from VxVM’s
view).
If more than one array is connected to the controller, suppress the path
from DMP using item 5 (Prevent multipathing of all disks
on a controller by VxVM), and then item 2 (Suppress a path
from VxVM’s view), from vxdiskadm option 17 (Prevent
multipathing/Suppress devices from VxVM’s view).

V-5-2-2400
VxVM vxdisksetup NOTICE V-5-2-2400 daname: Duplicate DA records

encountered for this device.

■ Description: This may occur if a disk has been replaced in a Sun StorEdgeTM
A5x00 (or similar) array without using the luxadm command to notify the
operating system. Duplicated disk access record entries similar to the
following appear in the output from the vxdisk list command:
c1t5d0s2 sliced c1t5d0s2 - error

c1t5d0s2 sliced c1t5d0s2 - online|error

Note: The status of the second entry may be online or error.

■ Action: Perform the following steps to correct the problem:

1 Use the following command for each of the duplicated disk access
names to remove them all from VxVM control:
# vxdisk rm daname
124 Error messages
Understanding messages

Run the vxdisk list command to ensure that you have removed all
entries for the disk access name.
2 Use the Solaris luxadm command to obtain the A5K array name and slot
number of the disk, and then use these with luxadm to remove the disk:
# luxadm disp /dev/rdsk/daname

# luxadm remove_device array_name,slot_number

3 Pull out the disk as instructed to by luxadm.

4 Run the following commands:
# devfsadm -C

# vxdctl enable

This completes the removal of device entries corresponding to the

physical disk.
5 As in step 1, run the vxdisk list and vxdisk rm commands to list any
remaining entries for the disk access name and remove these from
VxVM control.
6 Use the following luxadm command to take the disk offline on all the
paths to it. The following example shows how to take a disk offline that
is connected to controllers c1 and c2:
# luxadm -e offline /dev/dsk/c1t5d0s2

# luxadm -e offline /dev/dsk/c2t5d0s2

7 Repeat step 5 and step 6 until no entries remain for the disk in the
output from vxdisk list. This completes the removal of stale device
entries for the disk from VxVM.
8 Finally, follow the procedure to replace the failed or removed disk that
is described in the “Administering Disks” chapter of the Veritas Volume
Manager Administrator’s Guide.
 Index

Symbols recovering from backup tape 46

recovery 35

.cmdlog file 64

relocating subdisks 38

.translog file 66

replacing 49

/etc/init.d/vxvm-sysboot file 76

using aliases 36

/etc/system file

boot failure

missing or damaged 43

cannot open altboot_disk 36

restoring 44

cannot open boot device 39

/etc/vfstab file

damaged /usr entry 43

damaged 42

due to stale plexes 40

purpose 42

due to unusable plexes 40

/etc/vx/cbr/bk/diskgroup.dgid

invalid partition 41

dgid .binconfig file 70

booting system

dgid .cfgrec file 70

aliased disks 37

dgid .diskinfo file 70

recovery from failure 39

dgid.dginfo file 70

using CD-ROM 46

/etc/vx/log logging directory 63, 66

/lib/svc/method/vxvm-sysboot file 76

/var/adm/configd.log file 75
C
/var/adm/syslog/syslog.log file 76
CD-ROM, booting 46

CLEAN plex state 9

A client ID

in command logging file 64

ACTIVE plex state 9

in transaction logging file 67

ACTIVE volume state 18

cmdlog file 63

aliased disks 37

commands

associating with transactions 68

B logging 63

backup tapes, recovery 46

configuration

badlog flag
backing up for disk groups 69, 70

clearing for DCO 27

backup files 70

BADLOG plex state 16

resolving conflicting backups 72

boot command
restoring for disk groups 69, 71

-a flag 37, 44
copy-on-write

-s flag 44, 46
recovery from failure of 32

syntax 37

boot disks
D
alternate 36

data loss, RAID-5 15

configurations 35

DCO

hot-relocation 38

recovering volumes 25

listing aliases 37

removing badlog flag from 27

re-adding 49

126 Index

DCO volumes
Already at highest version 118

recovery from I/O failure on 33

Attempt to disable controller failed 118

debug message
Attempt to enable a controller that is not

logging 75
available 108

degraded mode, RAID-5 16

can’t import diskgroup 119

DEGRADED volume state 16

Can’t locate disk(s) 120

detached RAID-5 log plexes 20

Can’t open boot device 39

DETACHED volume kernel state 17

Cannot assign minor 115

devalias command 37
Cannot auto-import group 69, 98

DISABLED plex kernel state 9, 17

Cannot create /var/adm/utmp or /var/adm/

disabling VxVM 47
utmpx 42

disk group errors

Cannot find disk on slave node 114

new host ID 97
Cannot kill existing daemon 107

disk groups
cannot open /dev/vx/config 92

backing up configuration of 69, 70

Cannot open /etc/vfstab 92

configuration backup files 70

cannot open altboot_disk 36

recovering from failed move, split or join 24

Cannot recover temp database 109

resolving conflicting backups 72

Cannot remove last disk group configuration

restoring configuration of 69, 71

copy 113

disk IDs
Cannot reset VxVM kernel 93

fixing duplicate 122

Cannot start volume 89, 93, 94

disks
Clustering license restricts operation 116

aliased 37
Configuration records are inconsistent 98

causes of failure 7
Configuration too large for configuration

cleaning up configuration 59
copies 113

failing flag 13
CVM protocol version out of range 120

failures 16
daemon count must be above number while

fixing duplicated IDs 122

clustered 109

invalid partition 41
default log file 75

reattaching 14
Device is already open 92

reattaching failed 14
Differing version of vxconfigd installed 95

DMP
Disabled by errors 70, 90

fixing duplicated disk IDs 122

Disk for disk group not found 101

dumpadm command 39
Disk group does not exist 24, 112

Disk group errors

E multiple disk failures 90

Disk group has no valid configuration

eeprom
copies 98, 101

using boot disk aliases 36

Disk group version doesn’t support

EEPROM variables
feature 110

use-nvramrc? 36
Disk in use by another cluster 114

EMPTY plex state 9

Disk is in use by another host 101

ENABLED plex kernel state 9

Disk is not usable 112

ENABLED volume kernel state 18

Disk not moving, but subdisks on it are 117

error message
Disk reserved by another host 110

enable failed 110

Disk write failure 97

ERROR messages 78
Duplicate DA records encountered for this

error messages
device 123

A virtual disk device is open 93

Duplicate record in configuration 98

All transactions are disabled 90

 Index 127

enable failed 106, 107

Return from cluster_establish is Configuration
Error in cluster processing 114
daemon error 110

Error in disk group configuration copies 110

Skip disk group with duplicate name 99

Errors in some configuration copies 98, 100,

some subdisks are unusable and the parity is

107
stale 22

failed write of utmpx entry 42

startup script 76

File just loaded does not appear to be

Synchronization of the volume stopped due to

executable 41
I/O error 33

Format error in configuration copy 98

System boot disk does not have a valid root

group exists 112

plex 41

import failed 101

System boot disk does not have a valid rootvol

Incorrect protocol version in volboot file 119

plex 104

Insufficient DRL log size, logging is

System startup failure 41, 92

disabled 117
The VxVM restore daemon is already

Insufficient number of active snapshot mirrors

running 117

in snapshot_volume 121
There are two backups that have the same

Invalid block number 98

diskgroup name with different diskgroup

Invalid magic number 98

id 72

Join in progress 116

There is no volume configured for the root
Join not allowed now 116
device 104

logging 75
Transaction already in progress 110

Master sent no data 115

transactions are disabled 110

Memory allocation failure 91

Unable to add portal for cluster 115

Missing vxconfigd 108

Unexpected kernel error in configuration

Name conflicts with imported diskgroup 113

update 110

No more space in disk group configuration 113

Unrecognized operating mode 88

No such device or address 92

update failed 91

No such file or directory 92

upgrade operation failed 118

no valid complete plexes 93

Version number of kernel does not match

No valid disk found containing disk group 101

vxconfigd 105

no valid plexes 89
Version out of range for at least one node 117

Node activation conflict 116

Vol recovery in progress 115

Not in cluster 118

Volume for mount point /usr not found in

not updated with new host ID 97

rootdg disk group 105

Operation is not supported 111

Volume is not startable 21, 22

Plex plex not associated with a snapshot

volume not in rootdg disk group 103

volume 121
Volume or plex device is open or mounted 111

Plex plex not attached 121

Volume record id is not found in the

Plexes do not belong to the same snapshot

configuration 118

volume 121
volume state is invalid 94

RAID-5 plex does not map entire volume

vxclust not there 114

length 21
vxconfigd cannot boot-start RAID-5

Record already exists in disk group 111

volumes 108

Record is associated 112

vxconfigd minor number in use 115

Record volume is in disk group diskgroup1 plex

vxconfigd not ready 108

is in group diskgroup2 103, 104

Reimport of disk group failed 100

Request crosses disk group boundary 112

F
Retry rolling upgrade 116
failing flag

clearing 13

128 Index

failures
set in TUTIL0 field 24

disk 16

system 15

FATAL ERROR messages 78

N
fatal error messages
NEEDSYNC volume state 19

bootdg cannot be imported during boot 104

NOTICE messages 78

Memory allocation failure during startup 91

notice messages

files
added disk array 80

disk group configuration backup 70

Attempt to disable controller failed 80

Detached disk 90

Detached log for volume 94

H Detached plex in volume 94

hardware failure, recovery from 7

Detached subdisk in volume 95

hot-relocation
Detached volume 95

boot disks 38
disabled controller connected to disk array 81

defined 7
disabled dmpnode 81

RAID-5 18
disabled path belonging to dmpnode 82

root disks 38
enabled controller connected to disk array 82

starting up 61
enabled dmpnode 83

enabled path belonging to dmpnode 83

I
Offlining config copy 103

Path failure 86

INFO messages 79
read error on object 87

install-db file 47, 54

removed disk array 87

instant snapshot operations

Rootdisk has just one enabled path 80

recovery from failure of 29

Unable to resolve duplicate diskid 122

IOFAIL plex state 10

Volume entering degraded mode 93

L O
listing
OpenBoot PROMs (OPB) 37

alternate boot disks 36

unstartable volumes 8

log file
P
default 75
PANIC messages 78

syslog error messages 76

parity

vxconfigd 75
regeneration checkpointing 20

LOG plex state 16

resynchronization for RAID-5 19

log plexes
stale 15

importance for RAID-5 15

partitions, invalid 41

recovering RAID-5 20
plex kernel states

logging
DISABLED 9, 17

associating commands and transactions 68

ENABLED 9

commands and transactions 63

plex states

directory 63, 66
ACTIVE 9

logging debug error messages 75

BADLOG 16

CLEAN 9

M EMPTY 9

IOFAIL 10

mirrored volumes, recovering 11

LOG 16

MOVE flag

 Index 129

STALE 11
repairing 45

plexes
replacing 49

defined 9
root file system

displaying states of 8
backing up 46

in RECOVER state 12
configurations 35

mapping problems 21
damaged 52

recovering mirrored volumes 11

restoring 47

primary boot disk failure 36

rootability

process ID
cleaning up 56

in command logging file 64

reconfiguring 60

in transaction logging file 67

PROMs, boot 37

S
snapshot resynchronization
R recovery from errors during 33

RAID-5
stale parity 15

detached subdisks 16
states

failures 15
displaying for volumes and plexes 8

hot-relocation 18
subdisks

importance of log plexes 15

marking as non-stale 23

parity resynchronization 19
recovering after moving for RAID-5 20

recovering log plexes 20

recovering stale RAID-5 20

recovering stale subdisk 20

stale, starting volume 23

recovering volumes 18
unrelocating to replaced boot disk 38

recovery process 17
swap space
stale parity 15
configurations 35

starting forcibly 23
SYNC volume state 17, 19

starting volumes 21
syslog

startup recovery process 17

error log file 76

subdisk move recovery 20

system

unstartable volumes 21
reinstalling 52

reattaching disks 14
system failures 15

reconstructing-read mode, stale subdisks 16

RECOVER state 12

recovery

T
disk 14
transactions

reinstalling entire system 52

associating with commands 68

replacing
logging 66

boot disks 49
translog file 66

REPLAY volume state 17

TUTIL0 field

restarting disabled volumes 13

clearing MOVE flag 24

resynchronization

RAID-5 parity 19
U
root disks
udid_mismatch flag 122

booting alternate 36
ufsdump 46

configurations 35
ufsrestore

hot-relocation 38
restoring a UFS file system 47

re-adding 49
use-nvramrc? 36

recovering from backup tape 46

usr file system

recovery 35

130 Index

backing up 46 V-5-1-1236 21
configurations 35 V-5-1-1237 22
repairing 45 V-5-1-124 91
restoring 47 V-5-1-134 91
V-5-1-135 91
V V-5-1-148 92
V-5-1-1589 106
V-5-0-106 81 V-5-1-169 92
V-5-0-108 81 V-5-1-2020 107
V-5-0-110 81 V-5-1-2173 114
V-5-0-111 81 V-5-1-2192 115
V-5-0-112 82 V-5-1-2197 108
V-5-0-144 82 V-5-1-2198 108
V-5-0-145 82 V-5-1-2274 108
V-5-0-146 82 V-5-1-2290 108
V-5-0-147 83 V-5-1-2353 109
V-5-0-148 83 V-5-1-249 93
V-5-0-164 83 V-5-1-2524 109
V-5-0-166 83 V-5-1-2630 109
V-5-0-168 84 V-5-1-2824 110
V-5-0-181 84 V-5-1-2829 110
V-5-0-194 84 V-5-1-2830 110
V-5-0-196 84 V-5-1-2841 110
V-5-0-2 79 V-5-1-2860 110
V-5-0-207 85 V-5-1-2862 111
V-5-0-216 85 V-5-1-2866 111
V-5-0-237 85 V-5-1-2870 111
V-5-0-243 85 V-5-1-2879 112
V-5-0-244 86 V-5-1-2907 24, 112
V-5-0-249 86 V-5-1-2908 112
V-5-0-251 86 V-5-1-2911 112
V-5-0-252 87 V-5-1-2922 112
V-5-0-258 87 V-5-1-2928 113
V-5-0-281 87 V-5-1-2933 113
V-5-0-34 80 V-5-1-2935 113
V-5-0-35 80 V-5-1-3009 113
V-5-0-386 87 V-5-1-3020 114
V-5-0-4 79 V-5-1-3022 114
V-5-0-55 80 V-5-1-3023 114
V-5-0-64 80 V-5-1-3024 114
V-5-1-1049 41, 104 V-5-1-3025 115
V-5-1-1063 104 V-5-1-3030 115
V-5-1-111 89 V-5-1-3031 115
V-5-1-116 89 V-5-1-3032 115
V-5-1-117 89 V-5-1-3033 116
V-5-1-1171 105 V-5-1-3034 116
V-5-1-1186 105 V-5-1-3042 116
V-5-1-121 90 V-5-1-3046 116
V-5-1-122 90 V-5-1-3049 116
V-5-1-123 70, 90
 Index 131

V-5-1-3050 117 V-5-1-946 104

V-5-1-3091 117 V-5-2-2400 123
V-5-1-3212 117 VM disks, aliased 37
V-5-1-3243 117 volume kernel states
V-5-1-3362 118 DETACHED 17
V-5-1-3486 118 ENABLED 18
V-5-1-3689 118 volume states
V-5-1-3828 118 ACTIVE 18
V-5-1-3848 119 DEGRADED 16
V-5-1-4220 119 NEEDSYNC 19
V-5-1-4267 119 REPLAY 17
V-5-1-4277 120 SYNC 17, 19
V-5-1-4551 120 volumes
V-5-1-4620 120 cleaning up 56
V-5-1-4625 120 displaying states of 8
V-5-1-480 93 listing unstartable 8
V-5-1-484 93 RAID-5 data loss 15
V-5-1-485 94 reconfiguring 60
V-5-1-5150 121 recovering for DCO 25
V-5-1-5160 121 recovering mirrors 11
V-5-1-5161 121 recovering RAID-5 18
V-5-1-5162 121 restarting disabled 13
V-5-1-525 94 stale subdisks, starting 23
V-5-1-526 94 vxcmdlog
V-5-1-527 95 controlling command logging 63
V-5-1-528 95 vxconfigbackup
V-5-1-543 95 backing up disk group configuration 71
V-5-1-544 96 vxconfigd
V-5-1-545 96 log file 75
V-5-1-546 96 vxconfigd.log file 75
V-5-1-554 97 vxconfigrestore
V-5-1-557 97 restoring a disk group configuration 71
V-5-1-568 98 vxdco
V-5-1-569 69, 98 removing badlog flag from DCO 27
V-5-1-571 99 vxdctl
V-5-1-577 100 changing level of debug logging 76
V-5-1-579 100, 107 vxdg
V-5-1-583 100 recovering from failed disk group move, split or
V-5-1-587 101 join 24
V-5-1-5929 122 vxdisk
V-5-1-6012 72 updating the disk identifier 122
V-5-1-663 102 vxedit
V-5-1-6840 33 clearing a disk failing flag 13
V-5-1-737 103 vxinfo command 8
V-5-1-768 103 vxmend command 11
V-5-1-90 88 vxplex command 20
V-5-1-91 88 vxprint
V-5-1-92 88 displaying volume and plex states 8
V-5-1-923 103, 104 vxreattach
132 Index

reattaching failed disks 14

error 28 80

vxsnap make
Error while retrieving information from

recovery from failure of 30

SAL 120

vxsnap prepare
Failed to join cluster 83

recovery from failure of 30

Failed to log the detach of the DRL volume 83

vxsnap reattach
Failure in RAID-5 logging operation 84

recovery from failure of 32

Illegal vminor encountered 84

vxsnap refresh
Kernel log full 84

recovery from failure of 32

Kernel log update failed 84

vxsnap restore
library and vxconfigd disagree on existence of

recovery from failure of 31

client 109

vxtranslog
log object detached from RAID-5 volume 85

controlling transaction logging 66

Log size should be at least 100

vxunreloc command 39
mod_install returned errno 85

VxVM
object detached from RAID-5 volume 85

disabling 47
object plex detached from volume 79

RAID-5 recovery process 17

Overlapping mirror plex detached from

recovering configuration of 54
volume 85

reinstalling 54
Plex for root volume is stale or unusable 41

vxvol recover command 20

RAID-5 volume entering degraded mode

vxvol resync command 19

operation 86

vxvol start command 11

read error on mirror plex of volume 86

Received spurious close 81

W Root volumes are not supported on your PROM

version 87

WARNING messages 78
SAL authentication failed 120

warning messages
subdisk failed in plex 87

Cannot create device 88

unable to read label 42

Cannot exec /bin/rm to remove directory 88

Uncorrectable read error 79

Cannot exec /usr/bin/rm to remove

Uncorrectable write error 79

directory 88
volume already has at least one snapshot

Cannot find device number 80

plex 119

Cannot fork to remove directory 89

volume is detached 82

cannot log commit record for Diskgroup

Volume remapped 102

bootdg 80

Cannot open log file 89

corrupt label_sdo 42

Detaching plex from volume 90

detaching RAID-5 81

Disk device not found 96

Disk group is disabled 98

Disk group log may be too small 100

Disk in group flagged as shared 96

Disk in group locked by host 96

Disk names group but group ID differs 97

Disk skipped 96

disks not updated with new host ID 98

Double failure condition detected on RAID-

5 82

Duplicate virtual device number(s) 102