topic ONTAP 9.0 Simulator - root volume issues - boot loop in Simulator Discussions

ONTAP 9.0 Simulator - root volume issues - boot loop

r5a — Wed, 04 Jun 2025 14:34:25 GMT

Hello,

I have a NetApp ONTAP 9 simulator running in an ESX enviroment at home in a home lab as a single node. Recently lost power. I noticed my iSCSI stores wern't mounting.
Went to investigate and I noticed that my NetApp was booting but had root volume recovery needed

I was able to log in, and check the volumes and aggros - none had space issues from snapshots. all the errors seemed to be pointing to nvram issues.

Tried clearing the unsetenv bootarg.init.boot_recovery - still didn't work

Ran walfiron at the boot menu and now it appears to have orphaned every single disk and is even in a worse state - boot loops. Before I could atleast see my aggros as online and everything.

Am I screwed? I can only get to the maintenance mode boot

Re: ONTAP 9.0 Simulator - root volume issues - boot loop

SeanHatfield — Sat, 23 Sep 2017 07:51:45 GMT

The nvram in the sim is non-persistent, so a poorly timed host crash can be a challenge to recover from. What errors are you seeing now? And were you sending your cluster backups to an ftp server? It might not be recoverable at this point.

Re: ONTAP 9.0 Simulator - root volume issues - boot loop

r5a — Wed, 04 Oct 2017 00:36:23 GMT

Hi Sean,

Thanks for replying and sorry for the late response - been on vacation.

Unfortunately no backups - this was just a lab/training environment with a couple of VMs. I suppose it won't be too much of a pain to restore what was lost but I was hoping I could find some drastic measures to see if there's any way to get it restored to working order.

When I do an aggr status I see aggr1_data state in partial, and aggr0_sys partial as well. I'm assuming this is whats causing the boot problems as no root volume is found.

Every disk has an error

"Orphaning disk because of a generation count mismatch" which I assume offlines the disk or takes it out of the aggr as working properly? Is there anyway to force the disks to be online?

Anything I can do?