Member Avatar for bkai

how can i run vrepair; i load vrepair but when i select repair it says 'there are no unmounted volumes..u need dismount the volume ..." when i dismount volume and try to load vrepair again it says 'unable to find load file VREPAIR'
what is the correct procedure for vrepair? help appreciated greatly; thanks

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  • Latest Post Latest Post by JoetjeF

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There are two related but distinct problems in this thread: running the on-server repair utility reliably, and a NetWare 4.2 box that drops straight into the repair environment after a power glitch. The repair module must live on media that remains readable after you take the target volume offline; if the server can’t locate the repair binary once the volume is dismounted, the module was stored on the same volume. As suggested, keep repair and any namespace modules on the boot partition or another permanently-mounted device so you can unmount the problem volume and still run the tool.

For servers using NSS (NetWare 6 and later) the older file-system repair tool won’t operate on NSS volumes; use the NSS verification/rebuild utilities designed for pool-level checks and recovery. That explains why attempts to run the legacy tool on NSS-hosted volumes often report that no usable volumes are visible.

When the box falls to repair after a short outage (the NW4.2 case), treat hardware first: confirm the BIOS/RAID controller detects every disk, check for a degraded array or failed drive, inspect cabling and power, and capture controller logs or the server management console output. If filesystem work is needed, make a sector-level image before any destructive steps so you can roll back if a repair makes things worse. Example (from a Linux rescue environment):

dd if=/dev/sdX of=/mnt/backup/netware_vol.img bs=1M conv=noerror,sync

Safe order of work: image the media, run read-only verification with the correct tool for the filesystem, then perform repairs. Run directory-service repair only after volumes are healthy (as noted) and restore from backups if available. If hardware problems or unfamiliar corruption are present, pause and escalate to experienced Novell/NetWare support or a forensic data‑recovery service rather than attempting ad‑hoc repairs that can reduce the chance of full recovery.

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Member Avatar for JoetjeF

Copy vrepair.nlm and any used Name Space NLM (eg V_LONG.NLM, depending on what Name Space you use and what NetWare version) to the Boot partition.

This way you can unmount SYS and load vrepair from the boot partition instead.

Member Avatar for bkai

i've got a problem: my server is nw4.2 and it's a file server; there was power outage for 2 minutes and machine is on UPS; but when power came on server wouldn't start; it goes to vrepair and says no errors; but when i type 'load monitor' it doesn't load; no response from server; when Alt+Esc it beeps but nothing is shown on the screen; what could be the reason? volume is gone!?
how can i revive the server; if i switch on it always go to vrepair; i 'load install' tried to access netware partition it says partition not accessible; when i type mount all it goes to vrepair!
help appreciated

Member Avatar for kc0arf

Hello,

It might need to have DSRepair run on the volumes.

You might also need to examine how the UPS is installed and configured... if there are errors, it sounds like the shutdown was not cleanly executed. Did the UPS fail? You mentioned 2 minutes... that is not long for a UPS. Is it properly sized?

Check to make sure that the disks are physically alright. See if the RAID (do you have one) is properly configured and initialized. Check to see if any IDE drives are properly recognized. This info will fly up during the boot up, of course.

I like the idea of copying vrepair and the namespace nlm's to the boot partion. Never tried that trick before. Thank you on that one.

Christian

Member Avatar for terry mather

I have a slightly different VREPAIR problem. There are no apparent errors on my Novell 6 server, but I have a problem that causes Veritas backup to 'hang' for no apparent reason, and I've been advised to run VREPAIR. I have two volumes, 'SYS' and 'VOL1'; I dismounted 'VOL1' OK and loaded VREPAIR, choosing option 1 (repair a volume) but I get a message back 'there are no volumes defined'

Member Avatar for JoetjeF

NetWare 6 uses NSS by default. You have to use the commands 'nss /poolverify' and 'nss /poolrebuild'.

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