Reformatting 36 GB HD on HP9000

[Staci Tribelhorn]

I've recently swapped out a hard drive and want to reformat the problem drive for use in a test volume group to see if the problem follows the drive or stays with the tray. I've read a couple of responses in the forum that indicate I should NOT use mediainit to perform this task. If that's the case, what other command can I use. The hard drive is 36 gigs so I know that anything I use will take a while to complete.

[Bill Hassell]

Mediainit will take hours and hours. The actual program just triggers the drive's internal logic to perform a track integrity test and relocate any bad tracks automatically. This will not be a good way to locate a problem with the drive as bad tracks will disappear. If you need to test the drive for problems, you can use dd to put a fixed pattern on all the tracks (thereby erasing the original data) and create a volme group and lvols on it.

[Stf]

to reformat it you can use "pvcreate" command.
If pvcreate -f don't work you have to do the mediainit command to be sure that there isn't any bad block on your drive...

Stf ;-)

[Sanjay_6 · Accepted solution]

Hi Staci,

You do not have to use mediainit. you can use dd to check the drive.

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

Take a look at the total no of blocks in & out and if the command completed successfully or not.

If everything is okay, you can do pvcreate / vgcreate / vgextend to add this disk in VG's or anything you want to do with this disk.

Hope this helps.

Regds

[malvin drakley]

Hi there, can I throw in my 2 pennyworth. I had this problem where I "destroyed" 10x36gb drives with mediainit. After extensive discussions lasting over 3 months I finally got an admission from HP that the program would destroy them and leave them unuseable.They were displayed as 0 bytes after the mediainit. Fortunately I was able to find someone locally that was able to restore the data on the drives for me so I had a workable set of drives. I was told to use the "dd" command as previously suggested and you can use /dev/zero as your input file
hope this helps
malvin

[TwoProc]

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/dsk/cxxdxxtx
That'll zero it out for you.