Originally posted by: adilm

Hello!

We have 9131-52A machine with AIX 5.3 installed.

I made mksysb backup onto two tapes (for redundancy) and now trying to restore the system.

Boot from tape and start of restore goes without problems.
At some moment I see such messages like Overmounting filesystem /, importing user volume groups, Copying Cu*. Then I see few messages starting with odmdelete.
After that I see message:
Licensed materials - Property of IBM
...
... Some copyright notices ...
...

and at this moment system hangs forever.

Operator panel shows 0c46 which means Normal Installation Processing.

I was waiting for an hour and nothing happened. No activity at disks.

Same behavior for both mksysb tapes.

Did anyone face with such problem?
Please help!

Originally posted by: UncAndy79

The copyright notices occur just before the system reboots. Try to reboot the system if it hangs at this point again. Just make sure that your boot device is the disk you restored to and is not still pointing to the tape drive.

Originally posted by: adilm

We tried to reboot. The system starts boot process from disks and hangs with code 0517.

We booted system from CD in order to access rootvg (tried both access before mounting and after mounting filesystems) and found that neither of commands (ls, df, lspv, lsvg) works. It just says that such command was not found. It seems that no files were restored and only directories were created.
This fact can answer question why it hangs at the end of restoration after copyright notices: the "reboot" just doesn't exist and system can't be rebooted.

We found an older backup tape and restored the system. After restore we compared image.data of both tapes (old and new backup). There is no difference.

In the output of lsmksysb /dev/rmt0 of latest mksysb tape we see that all files and directories exist on the tape. They are just not restored for some reason.

Also we succeeded to restore various directories from the latest backup tape and bring the system to the actual state.

It is mysterious why these two backup tapes occured to be unusable for system restore.
There were no changes in system's TL, or any changes in rootvg.

Any ideas?

Originally posted by: UncAndy79

Are you restoring to the same kind of system from which the mksysb tapes were created? If not, then the mksysb tapes could be missing device drivers that are necessary to fully boot the new system. This could also explain the the hang at the end of the restore process.

Originally posted by: alethad

If my memory serves me I think a 517 LED hang is usually fixed by fsck'ing the rootvg file systems but only when in single user mode which is what you did.
I haven't seen one of these in several years.

Sometimes this is caused by a corrupted /etc/filesystems file.
You can find the actual steps if you still need it online.

Originally posted by: Kosala

Hi,

How did you get your tapes to boot? Did you boot with a CD first and then restored from the tape or did you make your tape bootable?

Cheers,
Ko

Originally posted by: adilm

No, I just boot from the tape (select tape drive as a boot device in SMS menu)

Originally posted by: adilm

When you make mksysb onto the tape, it automatically becomes bootabe.

Originally posted by: Kosala

Not necessarily. Some times the boot image is too big to fit in to the tape boot sector. Generally there is message at the end of mksysb saying if tape doesn't boot, to use a alternate boot device.

Cheers,
Ko