topic Re: How to dentify bad disk in Operating System - HP-UX

How to dentify bad disk

Diane M. Morin — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 11:44:17 GMT

Hi,

Is there away to send a signal that will make a disk bad/good flash so that it is easliy identified? This would be on a local scsi disk on an rx7620.

thanks
diane

Re: How to dentify bad disk

Steven E. Protter — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 11:46:12 GMT

ioscan -fnC disk

It will show NO_HW if the disk has power but has failed.

I've attached a script that does what you need.

Please make sure you change the email address in this script. If not it will email me at my old job, which I no longer have.

SEP

Re: How to dentify bad disk

RAC_1 — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 11:47:30 GMT

You can run dd command and try to read every block from disk. If it fails you are sure that disk is bad.

dd if=/dev/rdsk/cxtxdx of=/dev/null bs=1024k

man dd for details.

Anil

Re: How to dentify bad disk

Diane M. Morin — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 11:58:35 GMT

Thank you all,

But how do I id the disk if there is more than 1 on the local system? Let's say
you have /dev/dsk/c0t6d0 and /dev/dsk/c3t6d0. And I know that c3t6d0 is bad. Now I go out to the system and look at it. Which one is the broken one? Can I make the led flash on the good drive so I don't accidentally replace it.

I guess dd will work if I'm standing in front of the system and watch for disk activity.

Thanks again.

ps All my disk are running, I'm just curious if there's a command.

Re: How to dentify bad disk

Diane M. Morin — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 12:24:02 GMT

FYI: On HP Tru64 the following command will make use of the disk activity light and blink repeatly for n seconds.

hwmgr locate component -id 56 -time 30

diane

Re: How to dentify bad disk

Mel Burslan — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 12:34:05 GMT

Diane,

There is no way to flash an LED or do something to the same meaning that you can do from the HPUX. Even though dd (with a read from this drive and write to null, i.e., if=/dev/rdsk/cXtXdX of=/dev/null) can give an indication but for a totally powerfailed drive or on a busy system, where all the drives are being hammered by constant access, this dd may not be trusted.

The trust comes from knowing the device h/w paths. Unfortunately, there is no single document I could find which identifies every system/model of PA-RISC or Itanium systems' h/w paths. You may need to dig that up from your HP support engineers or from the owners of other systems.

when you run ioscan, you see the h/w paths as something like 0/0/1/1.0.0 from the following example:

Class I H/W Path Driver S/W State H/W Type Description
=====================================================================
disk 1 0/0/1/1.0.0 sdisk CLAIMED DEVICE SEAGATE ST336704LC
/dev/dsk/c1t0d0 /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0

this hardware paths directly identifies one single drive and depending on your server's particular model you can tell which device is this one.

On the newer servers, there are even inscribed markings of drive paths and/or scsi id's to tell you which drive is which if the drive is externally accesible.

Hope this helps

Hope this helps

Re: How to dentify bad disk

Diane M. Morin — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 12:40:13 GMT

Oh well. Next time I'm in my remote lab, I'll look at the front panel and see if there are any id's.

Thank you for all the help.

diane

Re: How to dentify bad disk

Diane M. Morin — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 12:41:21 GMT

No command on HP-UX.