🔴 Critical   ⏱ 5–30 min  Last verified: 19 May 2026
Affected versions: IBM AIX 7.1

📖 ~1 min read

Table of contents
  1. Symptom & Impact
  2. Environment & Reproduction
  3. Root Cause Analysis
  4. Quick Triage
  5. Step-by-Step Diagnosis
  6. Solution – Primary Fix
  7. Solution – Alternative Approaches
  8. Verification & Acceptance Criteria
  9. Rollback Plan
  10. Prevention & Hardening
  11. Related Errors & Cross-Refs
  12. References & Further Reading

Symptom & Impact

rootvg goes read-only or system hangs after a SAN path failure.

Environment & Reproduction

Single-copy LVs on multi-disk rootvg without mirroring.

Root Cause Analysis

Quorum lost when >50% of VGDA copies become unreachable.

Quick Triage

Check lsvg rootvg for QUORUM and PV STATE missing.

Step-by-Step Diagnosis

Use lsvg -p rootvg and lspv to confirm which hdisks dropped.

Illustrative mockup for aix-7.1 — vg_quorum_loss_rootvg_diag
Diagnostic view for vg-quorum-loss-rootvg — Illustrative mockup — Progressive Robot

Solution – Primary Fix

varyonvg -f rootvg after restoring paths, then mirrorvg rootvg.

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Illustrative mockup for aix-7.1 — vg_quorum_loss_rootvg_fix
Remediation steps for vg-quorum-loss-rootvg — Illustrative mockup — Progressive Robot

Solution – Alternative Approaches

Disable quorum with chvg -Qn rootvg as temporary workaround.

Verification & Acceptance Criteria

lsvg rootvg shows all PVs active and QUORUM ON.

Rollback Plan

Boot from alternate disk created with alt_disk_copy if rootvg unrecoverable.

Prevention & Hardening

Always mirror rootvg across two hdisks and validate with bosboot.

LVM_SA_QUORCLOSE, LVM_GS_RLEAVE, missing PV in lspv.

Related tutorial: View the step-by-step tutorial for aix-7.1.

View all aix-7.1 tutorials on the Tutorials Hub →

Browse all common problems & solutions on the Tutorials Hub.

References & Further Reading

IBM Redbook on AIX LVM mirroring and quorum.

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