grboyce@rodan.acs.syr.edu (George Robert Boyce) (04/18/91)
Back on 4/1/90, Vic Abell asked about info on 3rd party disks. In contrast to the problems with supporting 3rd party 8mm tape drives, the scsi disk support seems to be pretty good. After solving one problem (see a related posting), I was able to add an HP 1.2G disk without any difficulty. I thought it would be useful to share this information: tony% df /scratch Filesystem Total KB free %used iused %iused Mounted on /dev/scratch 970752 940120 3% 16 0% /scratch The sequence, while unusual for us BSD hackers, is not hard. I used SMIT where appropriate but here are the commands which SMIT executes (for a 3rd scsi disk at address 4 on scsi interface 0, and a filesystem called /scratch) (oh, and this is from memory): 1. Attach the device at a reasonable scsi address. Note that the default scsi interface on a rs6000/530 only supports two external devices. 2. format the drive by runing "diag", select 'service aid', 'disk media', 'format disk', 'disk drive in location 00-08-00-40'. 3. "mkdev -c disk -t 'osdisk' -s 'scsi' -p 'scsi0' -w '40'" 4. either make a new volume group or extend an existing one, so either "mkvg -f hdisk2" or "extendvg -f 'rootvg' 'hdisk2'. 5. either make a new file system or extend an old one, so either "crfs -v jfs -d'scratch' -m'/scratch' -A'no' -p'rw'" or "chfs -a size='xxxx' /scratch" The /usr/lpp/bos/README file (read it) has a few hints including the command "chdev -l hdisk2 -a pv=clear" command which might be needed before the mkvg command. I'm not sure because I was having this other problem at about that time (see related posting). Other than the format, this procedure takes about 5 minutes and the system does not need to be rebooted etc. This seems to be one area where AIX v3.1 is doing something right. George -- George R. Boyce, Manager, Systems Support, george@spica.npac.syr.edu CASE: Computer Applications and Software Engineering Center NPAC: Northeast Parallel Architectures Center SCCS: Syracuse Center for Computational Science