Sometimes I thought mirror a root disk is out of date and hardware RAID card is just what we need. But then I recognize that if the RAID card is broken, the machine broke too. And this never happen on a mirrored disk. But if it does, the only thing you should do is playing the lottery. It is truly beyond out human’s ability for the future and the past.
If you search the internet, there will be a lot of websites telling you how to doing this work. For you people, I just make other wheel, and for me, this is a way to study.
As it says, I have an IBM PS700 series machine with AIX 5.3. I have to shutdown the operation system in order to get the hard disk out. So, the step is, unmirror the rootvg, shutdown the OS, replace the broken disk and mirror the rootvg.
verify the location of the broken disk.
As you see, hdisk1 is broken.
PN of the hdisk1 is “42D0628”, SN is “6SE39SDG”. You can buy a disk the same as the broken one with the PN, and verify the location of broken disk with the SN.
Make sure the broken PV does not contain a dump lv. If does, just execute this command:
Then unmirror hdisk1 from rootvg, remove bootloader information, reduce it from rootvg and remove it out of the OS.
if you execute “lspv –l hdisk1” and the result contains information about “dumplv”, you should follow this steps:
Now you have verified the location of the broken disk, removed it from the rootvg and operation system. Because of the structure of this machine, shutdown the OS and replace hdisk1 with a now one. For normal AIX machine, this step is not necessary.
Then make the OS detected the new disk. Make sure it is the one we replaced by using the SN. In this case, it is called “hdisk9” and without a PVID.
Assign a PVID to “hdisk9”.
Extend rootvg whit the new disk (hdisk9). As you see, “TOTAL PPs” and “FREE PPs”on hdisk9 are the same. This just tell us the disk has no data on it.
Close the “quorum” of rootvg then make a mirror to hdisk9. When “closed/stale” become “closed/syncd”, mirror is finished.
Create boot image on hdisk9 then make the boot order normal.
If you finish this without any mistakes and error messages, congratulations, you replaced the root disk as successfully as I did.
How to Replace Root Disk on AIX 5.3
Sometimes I thought mirror a root disk is out of date and hardware RAID card is just what we need. But then I recognize that if the RAID card is broken, the machine broke too. And this never happen on a mirrored disk. But if it does, the only thing you should do is playing […]