Problem Installing HPUX 11.23 on rx2660

[Vin Zak]

I have a new rx2660 with SA P400 RAID controller and 6 x 300GB disks. It came with a virtual disk using 3 of the disks in RAID5. I removed that virtual disk and created a new one containing all 6 disks which came out to about 1.2TB. Now when I try to install HPUX 11.23 (June 2008), it lets me go through all the normal initial setup options, like selecting the disk to be intalled on, using LVM, setting the filesystem sizes, etc... But when it actually tries to start installing to the disk, it fails with messages like this:
WARNING: Could not clear boot block on disk "/dev/rdsk/c1t0d0s1" : fopen :I/O error (errno = 5)
Get the same message for s2 and s3
pvcreate: Couldn't open physical volume "/dev/rdsk/c1t0d0s2"
I/O error
Error: command "/sbin/pvcreate -f -B /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0s2" failed

OS installs fine if I create the virtual disk with 3 drives in RAID5, b ut not with all 6.

Any thoughts?

[Torsten.]

Not sure about the reason, but I would not do this.

Now you have a single "disk" of 1.2 TB as a boot volume...

Better create a smaller boot volume and another one for data.

[Vin Zak]

I would do that if the RAID controller would allow me to set the size of the virtual disk, however it automatically assigns all the space from the disks. I am trying to maximize my disk space and having to create two virtual disks means that I loose another 300GB of storage space.

[Torsten.]

I would run a recovery console and use saconfig to create a let's say RAID 5 with 2 different logical drives, one for OS, one for data.

Here you can use the -c

[Torsten.]

The manual

HP Smart Array 6400 Series Controller
Support Guide
HP-UX 11i v1, 11i v2, 11i v3

HP Part Number: J6369-9005 1
Published: September 2007

has a chapter

"Configuring for HP-UX 11i v1 Using Ignite-UX Offline"

about configuring a smartarray controller from a hp-ux recovery shell.

"...
3. At the recovery shell prompt, enter the following command:
# loadfile -l INSTCMDS/opt/raidsa/bin/ciss_insf

4. At the next prompt, enter the following command:
# /opt/raidsa/bin/ciss_insf
and verify that the device file for the Smart Array Controller has been created by reading the command output. For example:
Installing special file for Smart Array 6402
/dev/ciss3 installed

5. At the next prompt, enter the following command:
# loadfile -l INSTCMDS /opt/raidsa/bin/saconfig

6. Configure the arrays and logical drives following the instructions for the saconfig
configuration utility. See â The saconfig Configuration CLIâ (page 45). You must enter the entire path /opt/raidsa/bin/saconfig /dev/cissX to run saconfig...."



Hope this helps.

[Vin Zak]

I did find that document as well. It does say that is is for a different controller (I have the P400) and those instructions say they are for HPUX 11i v1 (I have v2). But, I hoped that it would still work.
When I typed in the loadfile commands, it was not able to find either the ciss_insf or the saconfig files to be able to load them.
I tried booting from both 11i v2 and 11i v3 OS disks and ran the recovery shell, but it could not find those files.
Do you know if this only works with 11i v1? If I could get the saconfig utility to run, I think that I would be able to solve my problem.

[chris huys_4]

Hi Vin,

Its because you selected raid5, that a minimum of 3 disks are selected in a lun.

With raid1, 2 disks will be selected.
With raid0, only 1 disk will be selected.

So if you would go for maximum capacity, minimum protection, you should be able to create 6* 300Gbyte raid0 luns.

But if you have allready configured all disks in 1 lun, you have to go through the offline utility ORCA, to delete the current lun and create the new luns at the wanted size.

The P400 users guide which contains how to access/create/delete luns can be found at

"
HP Smart Array SAS Controllers for Integrity
Servers Support Guide
HP-UX 11i v2 and 11i v3
"

http://docs.hp.com/en/J6369-90075/J6369-90075.pdf

The only trouble, I found with the orca utility procedure, was that I had to connect a "real" hp terminal console to the console/serial connection of the rx2660. I couldnt get the orca utility to work with reflection telnet via the mp..

Also if F8 doesnt work try , and the same for any other keys..

Good Luck,
Chris

[shanmuhanandam]

Hi Vin,
As per document the vg version 1.0 will support 2TB size of PV. But when you are installing the OS, it will not detect the disk size more than 1Tb, so please create the lun size of less than 1TB. So that you install the OS.


Thanks,
Shanmugam.

[Vin Zak]

Chris, thanks for the reply. Unfortunately that document does not help me. I have called HP support and got an answer to my original question, but still don't have a solution to my problem.
I was informed by HP support that HPUX will not install onto a "disk" larger than 1 TB. So, when I created my virtual disk using all 6 of my 300 GB disks, it was larger that 1 TB, while using only 3 of the disks was less than 1 TB and then HPUX would install.

So, now here is my current problem. If I use the ORCA utility to create a RAID5 virtual disk using all 6 300 GB drives, it does not allow me to specify the size of the virtual disk, but instead just assigns all available space to the virtual disk making it to large. I have used other RAID controllers that allow you to specify the size of the virtual disk when creating it. Unfortunately, the P400 does not seem to allow this.

As Torsten pointed out, the saconfig utility would seem to allow me to create the virtual disk and be able to specify the size using the -c option. However, I have not been able to find a way to run this utility before HPUX is installed (i.e. from the recovery console). The instructions that Torsten provided do not seem to work for HPUX 11i v2 on an rx2660 Itanium server.

Anyone have any other ideas?