AIX 5.3 migration gone bad

Hi all,

I have a 7026-H70. It is currently running 5200-10-06-0835. I tried to do a migration installation of AIX 5.3. The installation completed, but the system would not boot afterwards. The display on the front panel showed the code "4BA00830"

The only errors that I saw during the installation were a few messages such as "failed to install fileset XXXX in /usr/XXXX.

After unsuccessfully trying to get the system to boot several times, I rolled back the system to the previous version using a sysback backup and it booted fine again.

Does anyone have any ideas what this error means?

Please let me know what other information I could post that would be helpful.

Thanks in advance for any assistance!

Found some old service guide:

http://maben.homeip.net/static/computers/aix/machines%20tapes%20disks/H70/H70_hware.pdf

Has some steps to do when this error code shows up at boot. Anyway the errors that some filesets could not be installed is already looking bad.

You made sure AIX 5.3 runs/is "supported" on this old HW?

From AIX 5.2 to 5.3 a load of adapters became unsupported.
There are also firmware requirements for 5.3.

The release notes give details:

pSeries and AIX Information Center

Update the system, adapter and device firmware first.

Run the premigration script from the 5.3 CD to check your system out.

pSeries and AIX Information Center

Search in the left side search box for pre-migration for other associated links.

Check your applications all support AIX 5.3.

Then when you and system are ready, try again.

The H70 does support 5.3 with late firmware but some of the adapters supported at 5.2 are no longer supported and must be removed.

If you have a graphics card this may be unsupported at 5.3 and the cause of the failed fileset installation, details of supported cards are in the release notes.

Good luck and please let us / others know how you overcame the problem.

Hi,
I had similar issues and it turned out to be a defective CD. Do you have the possibility to try another CD set?

Kind regards
zxmaus

Thanks for the replies. I did upgrade the system firmware to latest version, but I did not update the firmware for any other devices. I also did not check to see if I have any unsupported adapters in the system.

I don't think it is a defective CD because I was able to boot from CD and do the migration. I got this error message when rebooting from hdisk0 after the migration.

I plan to try again tomorrow night after verifying the hardware and firmware. I'll let everyone know how it goes.

Thanks!

Hi all,

After unsuccessfully trying the migration again, I finally called IBM. The error code "4BA00830" means that the system cannot find a valid boot image. I tried going into maintenance mode and creating a boot image and got an error stating that it could not create the boot image.

After a long time on the phone with IBM, the errors are finally resolved. It turns out that someone had deleted several groups from the /etc/groups file, some of which are required by AIX. Some of the ones deleted included: sys, security, and mail. The installation of several key filesets failed because these groups were not present.

What finally fixed the issues was to run "lppchk -l" and install the missing filesets, resolving any issues with prerequisites along the way. While trying to install many of the filesets, we got errors about the missing groups, so we created the missing groups and re-ran the installation of those filesets.

Thanks again for your suggestions!

edit by bakunin: many thanks for writing this follow-up. While it should be the obvious thing to do to give back to the community (a solution) after having taken from the community (the time and effort to help solving the problem) it is only rarely done.

This is why i have nominated this post for "post of the week".