HP-UX CSE(c) Official Study Guide and Desk Reference

Chapter Syllabus

14.1 Recovering a Corrupt Boot Header Including a Missing ISL

14.2 Recovering from Having No Bootable Kernel

14.3 Recovering from a Missing Critical Boot File: /stand/rootconf

There are times when even an administrator can't recover a crashed HP-UX system without a little help. In this chapter, we look at a step-wise approach to recovering a crashed system. With a systematic approach, we can establish how far a system can boot and from there decide on our next course of action. The HP-UX Install Media has built-in functionality known as the Recovery Shell (hence, the CD/DVD from HP-UX 11.0 onward is titled Core OS Install and Recovery ). There are automated features in the Recovery Shell that allow us to repair a fundamental part of the root/boot disk and subsequently allow us to step through the various stages of an HP-UX boot process until our system can, hopefully, boot in multi- user mode. We look at three scenarios in this chapter:

• Recovering a corrupt boot header including a missing ISL.

• Recovering from having no bootable kernel.

• Recovering from a missing critical boot file: /stand/rootconf .

  Each of these scenarios will render a system unusable. The Recovery Shell itself can repair the first two scenarios. The third scenario requires additional configuration information at hand in order to effect a manual change to the system. This requires mounting the /stand filesystem and recreating the rootconf file by hand.