| | | | A1: | By definition, a mirrored disk means that both sides of the mirror (in a two-way mirror) should be identical. All else being equal, it makes no difference which disk we choose as the Primary Boot Path. If the disks are dissimilar, it would be advantageous to select the higher performing disk for the Primary Boot Path . Once a system has booted to multi- user mode, there are two potential ways to find out which disk the system booted from: -
If your system is fitted with a GSP that stores Console Logs, you could look through the Console Log to view the boot-up of the system. The Console Log is a circular log, which means that if there has been lots of activity on the system console, the boot-up information may be lost. -
You could consult the kernel variable " boot_string " using a command such as adb , e.g.: # echo "boot_string/S adb /stand/vmunix /dev/kmem | | | | | A2: | Technically, the disk is still bootable as if it still has an identifiable LIF header and LIF area. Our system will still be able to boot from the disk. However, when the AUTO file is parsed, it contains the boot command that includes the secondary loader, HP-UX . At this point, the boot to multi-user mode will fail. Without the secondary loader, we will not be able to boot an HP-UX kernel in any mode, i.e., maintenance mode, single-user mode, and so on. To remedy the situation, we will need to boot from our installation media/Ignite-UX server and run the Recovery Shell. From there, we can use the automated feature of " Recover an unbootable HP-UX system " and then choose the option to " Rebuild only the bootlif ". | | | | | A3: | Three possible solutions include the following: -
Use the “p option to mkboot to preserve the various files in the LIF area that constitute the ODE and other diagnostics. -
Use the “f <rdsk> -i <filename> options to mkboot whereby the “f <rdsk> is the name of another bootable disk on your system that contains the ODE and other diagnostic tools. The “i <filename> specifies the additional filenames as well as the default files to include in the LIF area. The “i <filename> option will need to be repeated to include all relevant files. -
Use the mkboot command as given, and then reinstall the Diagnostic subsystem. | | | | | A4: | The system will not boot to multi-user mode. The files that are installed (files such as vmunix , libc.sl , and so on.) have minimal functionality and can only support a system in a most minimal of states, i.e., single-user mode. This should be enough to allow us to restore the original files from a backup tape. Before installing the minimal-functionality files, the Recovery Shell will rename the original files to <filename>BK . Once we have recovered the files, we can then proceed to reboot the system into multi-user mode. | | | | | A5: | If our system has its root/boot disk mirrored, we would set the Primary and High-Availability Alternate as both sides of a two-way mirror. This would leave the Secondary boot path to be a CD/DVD/tape device. Alternately, LVM /VxVM supports three-way mirroring, which would mean we could have all three sides of our root/boot disk mirror configuration as boot path alternatives. The reason for having three boot paths is to support three-way LVM mirroring configurations as well as the limited space we have in NVRAM, which would limit the number of boot path configurations we have. With the three paths, we have more choice and flexibility in the configuration of our boot paths over the original two choices. | | |
