Cisco Prime Infrastructure 2.0 virtual appliance boot loop

An issue I came across was a virtual appliance stuck in a boot loop after the VMware environment lost its power.
The console output was giving off the following text prior to rebooting:

  Warning: pci_mmcfg_init marking 256MB space uncacheable
  sda: assuming drive cache: write through
  sda: assuming drive cache: write through
    Reading all physical volumes. This may take a while...
    Found volume group "smosvg" using metadata type lvm2
    11 logical volume(s) in volume group "smosvg" now active
    
  Boot Cisco ADE-OS Version: 2.0.1.038
  
  Restarting system.

The solution was, simply put, to boot a live linux CD and run fsck. Much like the guide found on Ciscos support forums (See link at bottom) regarding boot loop on NCS.

The live CD ISO I used was Fedora (Download here – fedoraproject.org)
Mount the ISO on your virtual appliance and boot from it.
Open up a terminal window and run the following commands

1. fdisk -l			List partitions (Notice your /dev/sd***)
2. lvm vgscan -v		Scan volume groups
3. lvm vgchange -a y		Set all volume groups to active
4. lvm lvs –a			List logical volumes
5. fsck -t ext3 –y /dev/sda1	Run Fsck on your drives partitions (Your /dev/*** may be different) 
6. fsck -t ext3 –y /dev/sda2
7. fsck -t ext3 -y /dev/sda3
8. fsck -t ext3 –y /dev/mapper/smosvg-altrootvol   Run Fsck on your logical volumes
9. fsck -t ext3 –y /dev/mapper/smosvg-home
10. fsck -t ext3 –y /dev/mapper/smosvg-localdiskvol
11. fsck -t ext3 –y /dev/mapper/smosvg-optvol
12. fsck -t ext3 –y /dev/mapper/smosvg-recvol
13. fsck -t ext3 –y /dev/mapper/smosvg-rootvol
14. fsck -t ext3 –y /dev/mapper/smosvg-storeddatavol
15. fsck -t ext3 –y /dev/mapper/smosvg-swapvol
16. fsck -t ext3 –y /dev/mapper/smosvg-tmpvol
17. fsck -t ext3 –y /dev/mapper/smosvg-usrvol
18. fsck -t ext3 –y /dev/mapper/smosvg-varvol

After successfully running these commands, and hopefully seeing fsck finding and correcting problems, issue the “reboot” command to boot up your virtual appliance.
This did in any case the trick for me.

Hope this helps,
Gos

Link to Cisco support forum: ncs-boot-loop-ade-os-vmdk-recovery – Cisco.com

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4 Responses to Cisco Prime Infrastructure 2.0 virtual appliance boot loop

  1. THANK-YOU!! I’d have never found that post on the Cisco forums since it’s about NCS and I was Googling Prime Infrastructure. I successfully did the fix on Prime Infrastructure 2.2.1 using GRML which is a command-line-centric Debian-based distro meant for admin/rescue tasks.

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