SUMMARY: Upgrading Disk

From: James Ford (jford@tusc.net)
Date: Thu Jan 14 1999 - 14:39:42 CST


Many thanks for the answers I have received from:

Russ Poffenberger <poffen@San-Jose.tt.slb.com>
David L. Markowitz <David.Markowitz@litronic.com
Kai O'Yang <Kai.Oyang@infotech.monash.edu.au>
Al Hopper <al@logical-approach.com>
Jeffrey C. Keyser <jkeyser@frycomm.com>

Most said that the method was sound and that if the two machines
were identical, it should work. I did receive two interesting comments
though - one from Al Hopper and one from Jeffrey Keyser.

I suspect I may have to re-think my methods. Instead of replacing the IDE
drive I may just use the 9G drive for large data areas.

FWIW, I found the 2940UW/OF card on www.pricewatch.com for $316.00.

-- James

(Interesting comment #1)
From: Jeffrey C. Keyser <jkeyser@frycomm.com>
I spoke to by local Sun VAR about doing this very thing, and they said
that it would void any support from Sun. I ended up creating /, /var,
/usr and /opt on my EIDE drive and am using SCSI Multi and UniPacks for
my data volumes.
-----
(Interesting comment #2)
From: Al Hopper <al@logical-approach.com>
I would not recommend the AHA2940UW/OF or AHA3940UW/OF. I bought three of
them and problems range from simply not seeing drives to seeing drives in
the boot PROM and not seeing them in the format utility and then some
other more subtle problems.

If I were you I would return them ASAP and get a refund. The Symbios
22801 and 22802 (dual diff - if memory serves me correctly) is the SCSI
card to use. Its supported directly by Solaris and is a good performer.
If you poke around on the Symbios site, you'll find that they will sell
you these cards directly (on a credit card) in quantity one or higher.

Save yourself some major brain damage on the Adaptec *UW/OF stuff.

---
From: Russ Poffenberger <poffen@San-Jose.tt.slb.com>
Yes, this should work. The real trick is specifying the boot device. You
won't simply be able to use just "diskn" because by default, the NVram
doesn't know about SCSI devices.

The device to boot from would be something like

/devices/pci@1f,0/pci@1/pci@1/SUNW,isptwo@4/sd@2,0:a

This example is for the SunSwift PCI card, so the Adaptec would certainly be slightly different. You can use the boot prom command (at the OK prompt) "nvalias" to create an alias like "diskn" that points to the actual device path. Then you can just say "boot diskn". --- From: David L. Markowitz <David.Markowitz@litronic.com> I suggest you make sure both machines have the latest firmware.

Patch-ID# 106121-05 Keywords: Desktop Standalone Flash PROM Update Synopsis: Hardware/PROM: Ultra 5/10 Standalone Flash PROM Update

I take it you wish to minimize downtime on machine 1? If the rest of the hardware is the same, that should work.

From: Kai O'Yang <Kai.Oyang@infotech.monash.edu.au> No problem. We ordered a SunSwift card with Ultra wide SCSI and 10/100Mb/s and dropped into our Ultra5. Installation of Solaris was able to use the SCSI disk. We currently use the IDE drive as /tmp.

BTW, I've heard that people can put in a cheap NCR 875 card (for the PC's) and it will also work (only 70 USD I think).



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