Q: I have a DS2405 rack with 73 GB disk installed. It was part of a VA7410 but now I just want to use the disks as a JBOD. However, the disks show size: 140000000 using diskinfo for 73 GB disks and HP-UX
hangs trying to use LVM with them. The diskinfo utility also reports sector size = 520, not 512.
A: These disks will be found in A6189A, A6214A, A6222A, A6264A, A6265A, A6250A, A6767A, A6268A and A6218A VA74xx racks. Affected disks are 18, 36, 73 and 146 GB. The DS2405 rack is commonly used with VA7400 array controllers and this controller reformats all the drives to a non-standard 520 bytes per sector rather than the expected 512 bytes. Replacement drives will exhibit this condition if they were previously used in a VA7400 disk array.
Solution:
The fix is to download the CommandView utility, install it on the HP-UX system and run the JBODfmt command. Download CommandView from:
HP-UX 11.31: (does not appear to be a link yet)
Once installed, run armdiscover to build the CommandView database. All the disks on the system should be displayed. If the disks do not show up, restart the hostagent and opendial services:
/sbin/init.d/hostagent stop
/sbin/init.d/opendial stop
/sbin/init.d/hostagent start
/sbin/init.d/opendial start
Then run armdiscover again.
JBODfmt –f /dev/rdsk/C_T_D
where C_T_D is the disk’s device name (such as c10t8d0). JBODfmt will star a background process to reformat each drive. It will take from 30 to 100 minutes to complete depending on the size of each disk. To verify that the disk is has been formatted correctly, use diskinfo:
diskinfo /dev/rdsk/c1t2d3
SCSI describe of /dev/rdsk/c8t9d0:
vendor: HP 73.4G
product id: ST373405FC
type: direct access
size: 71687369 Kbytes
bytes per sector: 512
CommandView Manual:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00300020/c00300020.pdf
– See more at: http://serviceitdirect.com/blog/disk-reports-520-byte-sectors#sthash.CgMgDlE9.dpuf
Tags: HP-UX