HP NonStop NS Identifying Disk Drive Problems, Possible Causes of Common Disk Drive Problems

Disk Drives: Monitoring and Recovery Identifying Disk Drive Problems

Identifying Disk Drive Problems

For recovery operations, refer to Recovery Operations for Disk Drives on page 10-12.

Table 10-2. Possible Causes of Common Disk Drive Problems

Problems	Possible Symptoms
Disk is full or does not have enough space.	Error 43 (unable to obtain disk space for file
	extent) occurs.
Disk free space is fragmented.
	If the disk is full, an application might go down.
One disk in a mirrored pair is down.	The storage subsystem generates an event
	message but the application continues to run.
An unmirrored disk is down, or both disks	Users report access problems, applications go
in a mirrored pair are down.	down, and the storage subsystem generates
	event messages.
Performance problems occur due to path	Users report poor application performance.
switches or a cache size that is too small.
Defective tracks or sectors exist.	Output from SCF INFO DISK, BAD command
	indicates unspared defective sectors.
Disk errors exceed a certain limit.	Intm-errors-exceeded message
Slow I/O operations exceed a certain limit.	Slow-IOs-threshold-exceeded message

Internal SCSI Disk Drives

The most common disk drive problems on a NonStop S-series server include:

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Space problems such as full disks or free-space fragmentation

Stopped disks

Performance problems

Defective tracks or sectors

M8xxx Fibre Channel Disk Drives

The most common disk problems on an Integrity NonStop NS-series server are intm- errors-exceeded and slow-IOs-threshold-exceeded errors on the Fibre Channel loop.

Such errors are often normal. However, if they cause problems on a Fibre Channel loop, power the affected disk down and up again. This procedure can solve the problem temporarily.

Unless you are a qualified service provider, you cannot perform any physical actions on disk drives. However, operators can use OSM and SCF commands.

HP Integrity NonStop NS-Series Operations Guide—529869-005

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