From: leichter@lrw.com (Jerry Leichter)
Newsgroups: comp.os.vms
Subject: re: Hhhhheeeeelllllllppppp! can't boot!
Date: 24 Aug 92 13:01:50 GMT
Distribution: world
Organization: The Internet


	I think I accidentally screwed up one of our machine (a boot node) by
	interrupt autogen then continue without starting all over. Now the
	machine can't boot. I get register dump when I try to get login:. Boot
	into sysboot> and "use default" doesn't help. "set startup_p1 "min""
	doesn't either. I can "set/startup OPA0:" and get "$". But there
	doesn't seem much I can do. I tried to delete vaxvmssys.par and copy a
	vaxvmssys.old to it, hope it can revert the machine to the state that
	was set to by vaxvmssys.old. This doesn't work either. There are
	messages like saying error activating mountshr... and secureshrp or
	secureshrp protected image must be installed... I didn't realize it's
	so serious. Before I try to restore the weekly backup (that we'll lost
	some work), can somebody tell me what can I do?

It sounds as if you are basically on the right track - but you've gotten
yourself into trouble as you've gone along.

When you SET/STARTUP OPA0:, none of the usual startup code gets run.  This
means, in particular, that none of the normally-installed images actually
get installed.  If you then need, for example, to mount a disk, you'll get
errors such as you've reported.  It isn't clear to me from your description
what is being mounted, though....

CTRL/Y'ing out of AUTOGEN is USUALLY safe.  However, it will warn you that it
might have created new versions of several files, and that you should check
them.  Did it?  Did you?

AUTOGEN can change a number of files that could affect system boot.  Your
guess of vaxvmssys was a good one; however, that is probably not the cause
here.  I'll hazard a guess, based on your description of the original problem,
that the bad file is SYS$MANAGER:VMSIMAGES.DAT.  This is a file that is used
during normal system startup to install important images with the privileges
they need.  AUTOGEN creates it whenever it runs, since the details can be
tailored depending mainly on how much memory your system has.  AUTOGEN simply
creates a new version of the file each time; it doesn't purge the old one.
So you can easily recover.

The only other files of importance that AUTOGEN might touch are the page and
swap files.  I doubt they are the cause of the problem, but you can easily
check to see if they look reasonable.  You can also modify them using SYSGEN
directly.

If all else fails, or you run out of time and patience, it should NOT be
necessary to restore the entire disk from a backup.  Most likely, the only
files that matter are those in SYS$MANAGER.  (Beyond those, there might be
some files in SYS$SYSTEM.)  Unfortunately, you can't do a selective restore
with standalone BACKUP, so you'll have to get BACKUP to work without going
through the usual system startup.  The easiest way to do this is to boot
with OPA0: as the startup file, then try BACKUP.  You'll get a complaint
about some image not being installed.  Use INSTALL to install it.  Try again.
While laborious, this process should converge fairly quickly.

Good luck!
							-- Jerry