Installing 11i on external disk fails (C3600 workstation)

[Martin Maierhofer]

I'm currently running HP/UX11 on a C3600 workstation, using the internal disk and an external SCSI disk (IBM, 18Gig). I'm trying to cold-install 11i (mission critical OE) onto the external disk, to get a dual-boot system.

Ignite-UX boots fine from the 11i CD-ROM, and I can set the IBM disk as root volume. However, soon after the installation starts, my external disk jams up (disk lights are continuously on), and I get the following message:

LVM: vg[0]: pvnum=0 (dev_t=0x...) is POWERFAILED

(there is also a paragraph about an abnormally large number of errors being reported from the I/O subsystem...)

I've tried installing onto a different external HD, using other SCSI IDs, etc. but all to no avail, sooner or later the disk just locks up (the furthest it got was to install two or three packages before giving up).

Has anyone seen something like that/any ideas about what could cause this? The external disks are absolutely fine when used with 11 (although they're obviously not as stressed as when installing)...

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Have you checked for proper termination on both ends of the SCSI bus? Termination power?
At or near maximum length?

[Patrick Wallek]

I think I would definitely look at SCSI termination, SCSI chain length, etc. You might also check the terminators and cables themselves and maybe try changing them out. I seriously doubt that the problem is with 11i. I recently installed 11i on a pair of external 9GB drives attached to a B132L and had no trouble.

[Vincenzo Restuccia]

You can try the mirror of disks with lvextend -m 1 if you have MIRROR-UX else dd if=/dev/rdsk/cxtyd0 of==/dev/rdsk/cztwd0 bs=4096k.

[Martin Maierhofer]

I've checked for SCSI termination, the power indicator is on as well (also tried removing the terminator, but the firmware wouldn't even find the SCSI disks then). Is there anything in particular I have to look out for? (How would I check if the bus is terminated internally?)

I had two different external HDs (but identical model), using two different cables, so suspect that the problem isn't related to these...

I do suspect a hardware problem as well, but have no clue at the moment where to look...

[Shannon Petry]

You either have a bad disk, or a bad terminator. Since you have used multiple disks, this then points to the terminator.

I just went through a similari problem with a C3600 where the disk worked fine on a C3000, but failed cronically on the C3600. I had an open ticket with HP for almost 2 months. I did not beileve that it was a terminator, as this disk worked on a sister station. After ordering and installing the HP recommended terminator, all problems dissappeared!

It may seem futile, and I can not tell you what the difference is in the terminator shipped with the C3600 and the one HP said I needed for the external to work, but it did!

For mirror's you need MirrorUX to be installed (unless this is changed in 11i????). This is the best redundancy for a system! Remember that since your system disks are to be mirrored, write performance will decrease niticably. DONT MIRROR /tmp or swap! Since most system directories change very little it should not effect overall performance!

Regards,
Shannon

[Martin Maierhofer]

Hmm, yes, I tried it both with the terminators that came with the disks, and the one that came with the workstation.

Does anyone know which terminator is recommended by HP for my setup?

[Kenneth Platz]

I don't know if this is relevant to this particular problem, but if I recall correctly, only the 11i TCOE is supported on 700 series workstations -- I do not believe the 11i MC OE is supported on workstations. Whether or not this would cause these errors is another issue entirely of course.