Troubleshooting AIX migration

Troubleshooting AIX migration ( from 6.1 to 7.1 )

I was migrating my AIX server from 6.1 to 7.1.





Since, the customer had only a couple AIX servers to migrate, they wanted us to migrate using DVD ( not nimadm ).  Hands and eyes team in the data centre loaded the DVD in the drive. I have booted the server from the installation DVD and chosen migration installation mode. Everything went fine. LED panel is displaying "000" and the system came up.

But after reboot, just before showing the login prompt, my system started to reboot again. Alas!! what is this? Fine. Everything happens for a reason. I booted my system from DVD again in maintenance mode. Checked the filesystem consistency. Everything looked fine! Then who is the culprit? Again I tried to boot the server, but he was going on a reboot loop. Ok, let me boot again in maintenance mode. My instinct says that the culprit should be in /etc/inittab entries. 

I prepared for an encounter with the inittab. I have taken three copies of inittab file and then just kept the first three entires - "init, brc and cons" must for the system to come up and show the console. And yess!! the system came up. Then I added three more entries in inittab and rebooted the machine. I repeated this process until I found the black sheep who prevented the system from booting!

Atlast I found the inittab entry "pca" was causing the trouble. Then I made a call with IBM and they confirmed this inittab entry is a bug which gets added after migration installation. Some utility is added for a test purpose with "wait" action. The system was able to boot normally after removing that entry. Happy! 

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