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Tips on Deleting Bad System Disks

As HP 3000s age their disks go bad, the fate of any component with moving parts. Even after replacing a faulty drive — which is not expensive at today's prices — there are a few software steps to perform. Wyell Grunwald explains of the failed system (bootup) disk

Our disk was a MEMBER in MPEXL_SYSTEM_VOLUME_SET. I am trying to delete the disk off the system.  Upon startup of the machine is says that LDEV 4 is not available.  When going into SYSGEN, then IO, then DDEV 4 it gives me a warning that it is part of the system volume set — cannot be deleted.  I have done an INSTALL from tape (because some of the system files were on that device), which worked successfully. How do I get rid of this disk?

Gilles Schipper of support provider GSA said that INSTALL is something to watch while resetting 3000 system disks.

Sounds like the install did not leave you with only a single MPEXL_SYSTEM_VOLUME_SET disk.

Could it be that you have more than one system volume after INSTALL because other, non-LDEV 1 volumes were added with the AVOL command of SYSGEN - instead of the more traditional way of adding system volumes via th VOLUTIL utility?

You can check as follows:

SYSGEN
IO
LVOL

If the resulting output shows more than one volume, that's the answer.

He offers a repair solution as well.

The solution would be as follows:

1. reboot with:

START NORECOVERY SINGLE-DISC SINGLE-USER

2. with SYSGEN, perform a DVOL for all non-ldev1 volumes

3. HOLD, then KEEP CONFIG.SYS

4. create new SLT.

5. perform INSTALL from newly-created SLT.

6. add any non-ldev1 system volumes with VOLUTIL. This will avoid such problems in future.

If you do see only 1 system volume with the LVOL command, the only thing I can think of is that VOLUTIL was used to add ldev 4 to the MPEXL_SYSTEM_VOLUME_SET after the install.

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