Mailing List Archive: Dirty Shutdown, There is Possible Loss of Data

Dirty Shutdown, There is Possible Loss of Data

Nov 11, 2002, 8:00 AM

Post #1 of 3 (1479 views)

Hello,

Our hot spares filer, running 5.1.2, won't boot up all the way this AM
after a pretty nasty power outage last night. It says:

Warning: previous shutdown was dirty, there is possible loss of data.
dumping core....

ok

First reboot it dumped core, next it says core is already there.

The support site says that we need to contact NetApps for a procedure to
recover the file systems and that is about it. The manuals we have are
pretty much silent on this problem.

Is there anything we can do to recover or just start from scratch (zero
disks, reload -- which I can do since this is a spares machine)?

I figure this would be a good problem to try and resolve in case we see
it on our production filer.

Pointers, guidance are much appreciated.

Cheers,

Dan O'Brien, dmobrien@lcsi.net
Cell: 614-783-4859 Work: 614-476-8473
Home: 740-927-2178 Pataskala, OH

Re: Dirty Shutdown, There is Possible Loss of Data [ In reply to ]

Joseph.Bishop at jpl

Nov 11, 2002, 9:19 AM

Post #2 of 3 (1439 views)

Permalink

Dan,

How many volumes do you have? How large is each volume?

Don't jump right to the zeroing of all disks,you may be able to salvage the
data on volumes other than vol0.

Joe

At 10:00 AM 11/11/02 -0500, Dan O'Brien wrote:
>Hello,
>
>Our hot spares filer, running 5.1.2, won't boot up all the way this AM
>after a pretty nasty power outage last night. It says:
>
>Warning: previous shutdown was dirty, there is possible loss of data.
>dumping core....
>
>ok
>
>First reboot it dumped core, next it says core is already there.
>
>The support site says that we need to contact NetApps for a procedure to
>recover the file systems and that is about it. The manuals we have are
>pretty much silent on this problem.
>
>Is there anything we can do to recover or just start from scratch (zero
>disks, reload -- which I can do since this is a spares machine)?
>
>I figure this would be a good problem to try and resolve in case we see it
>on our production filer.
>
>Pointers, guidance are much appreciated.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Dan O'Brien, dmobrien@lcsi.net
>Cell: 614-783-4859 Work: 614-476-8473
>Home: 740-927-2178 Pataskala, OH

Re: Dirty Shutdown, There is Possible Loss of Data [ In reply to ]

cet1 at cus

Nov 11, 2002, 10:07 AM

Post #3 of 3 (1440 views)

Permalink

dmobrien@lcsi.net (Dan O'Brien) writes:
[...]
>
> The support site says that we need to contact NetApps for a procedure to
> recover the file systems and that is about it.

So: why don't you?

Your symptoms sound a lot like damaged NVRAM contents that need to
be junked to get through a reboot cleanly (backing off to the last
consistency point, i.e. you could lose up to 10 seconds of filing
system updates). From experience, NetApp *will* be able to talk you
through a procedure to do that.

Chris Thompson
Email: cet1@cam.ac.uk