Volume group locked!! - Help

[Henry J. Ferrara]

Well, I hope I don't offend anyone, but no matter how much I work on an
AIX system the worse I like it.

This time I have gotten myself in a real bind. One of my disks died, which
was a member of a multi-volume file system. In the process of getting
the disk working, I have gotten the volume group locked. I only have one
volume group (rootvg). There were three drives in the volume group.
I believe I am running AIX 3.2.1 (but it is hard to determine the minor
number). The last action I did was delete a logical volume (this was the
logical volume that included the dead drive). Now no matter what I do
I get the error message:

0516-366 putlvodm: Volume group rootvg is locked; Try again.

Obviously, trying again does work. I can't even do a lsvg -l rootvg.

P.S. I know deleting the logical volume group wasn't exactly the best thing
I could of done, but I was figuring I will just rebuild the logical volume.
It ended up that I think all I needed to do was assign the new disk to
the volume group and I could have rebuilt the logical volumes file system.
Oh well.

-Thanks in advance

Henry
--

hjfe...@TASC.COM
Henry Ferrara
TASC
55 Walkers Brook Drive
Reading, MA 01867

[Stephane Perrot]

# putlvodm -K ` getlvodm -v <volume group name> `

--
Stephane Perrot perr...@epita.fr
MORPHO Systemes (load-library "std-disclaim")

[Henry J. Ferrara]

First off, I would like to thank all the people who responded to my original
posting. Alot of people said that:

putlvodm -K rootvg

would unlock the volume group. Unfortunately, this did not work.
I just received the error message- Volume group rootvg is locked; Try again.
What did work was a suggestion from Uli Rieger (I have included his
original email note at the end). What I had to do is:

1. cd /etc/objrepos
2. cp CuAt CuAt.bak
3. odme CuAt
4. From within odme, select Retrieve/Edit. Then page down until
I found an entry named "rootvg" (the name of my volume group), with
attribute "locked" and a value of "y". I selected that entry and
deleted it. Then I exitted and saved the file.
5. Once I did this the volume group was unlocked. Afterwards for some
reason, the volume group would get locked again and I would have to
repeat the steps.

His email note mentioned, the CuDep and CuDv files, but I did not
find any references to rootvg in them so I did not modify them.
This solution is kind of dangerous (hence the need to backup the files
you are modifing), but it is the only solution that worked.

Thanks Uli, and all the replys I received. Once again the Usenet
community comes through with the answer.

-Henry

Uli's email note:

Date: Wed, 17 Nov 93 14:10 MET
From: rie...@netmbx.netmbx.de (Ulrich Rieger)
Subject: Re: Volume group locked!! - Help
Newsgroups: comp.unix.aix

Hi Henry,
this problem you described, has hapend some times to me too. I'm not able
to give you the academic satisfying answer, but to give you this tip without
any warranties:

1) step down to /etc/objrepos

2) make a backup-copy of any file with prefix "Cu"

3) enter "odme CuAt"
an look for the line, where this volume-group is remarked as "locked"

Delete this flag

4) repeat 3) whith the files CuDep CuDv

####
I dont remember, in which of these files a volumegroup usualy has to be locked
, but i know, THATs the way you solve the problem.

regards Uli

Ulrich Rieger, CompuNet GmbH, Mariendorfer Damm 1-3, 12099 Berlin, Germany
Phone: +49 30 70785-193 FAX: -130 VNET: IBMMAIL(DECNRURI)
Internet: u...@CNB.CompuNet.DE CompuServe: 100042,1712

[Peter Gedeck]

I had a similar problem with a locked volume group. The volume group
had 2 harddisk. After a shutdown one of the harddisk was broken, so
we had to repair it. I hoped, that after the repair, we could use
the harddisk again, so I deactivated the harddisk, but didn't remove
it from the volume group.
But we received a new harddisk with a new serial-number. I included
it into the volume group and tried to remove the definition of the
old.
Somehow the volume group was locked now and the old disk was still
defined as part of the volume group. Removing the old physical volume
from the volume group failed, even when deallocation of all partitions
on the physical volume was set. The message in SMIT was to set this
flag !!!
The solution to this problem was, that a filesystem was defined on the old
disk (jfslog) and due to this it was not possible to remove the disk.
I first had to remove the jfslog-filesystem and after this it was possible
to remove the physical volume from the volume group and so the disk was
not locked any more.

Peter Gedeck
ged...@pctc.chemie.uni-erlangen.de