won't mount /usr...won't boot fully

UNIX AIX
1

Hello:
NOOB here. I attempted to use smit mkcd. Failed on first attempt, not enough space. 2nd attempt tried to place iso on /usr, not enough space there. Cleanup ran for about 5 minutes after aborting. Now AIX won't boot. LCD display on 7029-6E3 says: 0517 MOUNT /USR. Attempted to boot from CD AIX 5L POWER V 5.2 5765-E62 Volume 1 of 7 disk with no luck.

Apparently I'm supposed to hit F5 on keyboard when I see the word keyboard on the boot screen. It goes too fast and always boots to AIX screen:

STARTING SOFTWARE PLEASE WAIT...

----------------
Welcome to AIX
boot image timestamp: 15:32
bla
bla
bla
closing stdin and stdout...
----------------------

The drive in the machine is a DVD drive. All I want to do is boot into maintenace mode so I can hopefully clean up the /USR fs and get back up and running.

Can some please comment on the errors of my ways and point me in the right direction please?!?

Thanks.

Bill

2

I believe you should be pressing "1" to go into SMS mode not F5. Once you get into maintenance mode, there is a very limited set of commands you can use if /usr cannot be mounted. Your only option may be a restore at this point.

3

You are correct and I figured that out. I've spoken to a consultant and it looks as though a restore is needed. Thanks for the reply.

4

did you try and fsck /usr while in maintenance mode?

5

no i didn't. To be totally honest, I'm scared, as I don't have a great backup of this data. It has been suggested, but being a noob... I'm thinking that that the problem is the /usr fs is too full to do anything. After investigating I'm concerned the rootvg may be hosed as well. My stomach hurts....

6

Do you get any message while /usr can't be mounted? I doubt it can't be mounted because it's full. Maybe you are better off to use fsck like dig1tal suggested. That would be what I would do in this case too. fsck will ask you if something should be tried to be fixed etc.
At least you might be able after this to reboot.

What data could be lost? Is your non-OS data in the rootvg and saved with your mksysb or being excluded and backed up by some network backup software?

7

0517
mount /usr
on the LCD display on the RS/6000 server

8

would you be so kind as to help with the syntax of the fsck command so I don't screw something up anymore. i'm going to ibm's site to look myself, but would really appreciate any comments.
regards!!!

9

ok...ran fsck, as in, fsck /dev/hd4, where my /usr was. No error detected. type exit from maintenace mode and receive:

/etc/getrootfs[586]: /usr/bin/ksh: not found
.
.
.

seems like the os was overwritten or wiped somehow.

10

Ah okay, sorry, haven't recognized that at first.

So here you go:

  • Enter the SMS menu
  • Select "Start Maintenance Mode for System Recovery"
  • Select "Access a Root Volume Group"
  • Select one the VG which has the hdisks in it which looks like your rootvg, I guess hdisk0 and 1 if you have hopefully a mirrored rootvg :wink:
  • Select "Access this Volume Group and start a shell before mounting file systems"
  • then do following, using jfs or jfs2:
logform -V jfs2 /dev/hd8
fsck -y -V jfs2 /dev/hd1
fsck -y -V jfs2 /dev/hd2
fsck -y -V jfs2 /dev/hd3
fsck -y -V jfs2 /dev/hd4
fsck -y -V jfs2 /dev/hd9var
fsck -y -V jfs2 /dev/hd10opt
exit

Then have a reboot and hope it's working. Right from the AIX Sys Admin II: Problem Determination.

11

in maintenance mode, with the filesystem not mounted type:
fsck -y /dev/hd2

12

What was the command you used to "clean up" the file you put there...

If you did something like rm -r * or something similar you may have removed more than the one file you wanted to. In which case you will need to rebuild /usr from a mksysb or rebuild the full system.