Hi,
Well here is my summary.
Thanks to:
John Malick
Richard Kelly (BoxHill)
Original Q:
> Hi sunners,
>
> I have installed BoxHill 9G and 18G disks on new servers a lot of times
with
> no problems....until now.
>
> On this one server I installed a PCI SCSI interface card to add another
> disk. The problem is that this disk is not being recognised. i.e when I
run
> "format", I get:
> <drive type unknown>
>
> >From there it wants me to plug in information about the disk. This is
> strange because I have never had to do this before. I suspect it has
> something to do with the second interface card (firmware bug?).
>
> BoxHill suggested that the entry from the /etc/format.dat file is missing
-
> but the entry is missing on all my servers which are using these drives,
so
> I don't think that is the answer.
>
> I am using an Ultra 60 with Soalris 2.6. Firmware 3.11.25
Summary:
The newer flavors of Solaris are capable of auto-configuring new drives
using the format menu. Even if a drive label is lost, as may sometimes
happen, format can still probe the device and extract the drive parameters
to reconstruct the /etc/format.dat entry.
If format can not autoconfigure the drive then there may be a hardware
problem with the drive itself. For instance, if a drive does not
completely finish spinning up, format will be unable to read the geometry
information off the drive.
In my case I think the problem laid with the server and not the disk. When I
first installed the disk it was working fne. The server then crashed twice
that day after the first time the disk was not a recognised disk type and
after the second crash the server's internal disk would not work properly.
The internal disk would spin up but not lights would light up. I tried
replacing the internal drive to no avail. I then relaced the whole server as
I suspected a loose connector somewhere within the server. Once the server
was replaced - no problems, all disks working fine!
Its lucky we have some standby servers!
Regards,
Andrew
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Sep 28 2001 - 23:12:52 CDT