I was going to try on the FAS3240AE in our lab, except it has UCS boot luns on both nodes... our other SEs wouldn't like me halting a node...but I was able to get an old FAS2020A with ONTAP 7.3 and try it out. Andrey was right...forcetakeover does bring the partner node up. See console below... I did a halt -f on the partner node...simulating a node that didn't come up. Then cf forcetakeover worked. I then booted node2 and it came up waiting for giveback and I was able to cf giveback.
I wasn't sure about this until testing it...glad we have this community to learn and relearn what we forget
node1> cf status
node2 may be down, takeover disabled because of reason (partner halted in notakeover mode)
node1 has disabled takeover by node2 (interconnect error)
VIA Interconnect is down (link down).
node1> cf takeover
cf: takeover cannot be performed because of reason (partner halted in notakeover mode)
node1> cf takeover -f
cf: takeover cannot be performed because of reason (partner halted in notakeover mode)
node1> cf forcetakeover
cf forcetakeover may lead to data corruption; really force a takeover? y
cf: forcetakeover initiated by operator
node1(takeover)>