Trying to create VG off of a VA7100 array

[Mark Allen_3]

Hi I was hoping someone could help me out here.

I have just purchased an L3000 with hpux11 and have a VA7100 array with 87 Gig of available space over 6 disks (raid10) and 1 LUN. The setup of the LUN was done by the company I purchased the equipment from. It was done using commandview.

If I go into commandview it shows the disk array.

So far I have done the following on the L3000:
1. pvcreate /dev/rdsk/c4t0d0
2. mkdir /dev/vg01
3. mknod /dev/vg01/group c 64 0x010000
4. vgcreate /dev/vg01 /dev/dsk/c4t0d0
After the 4th step I get the following message:

vgcreate: Physical Volume "/dev/dsk/c4t0d0" contains no LVM information.

This is probably something really simple but thought I'd throw it out there and see if anyone see's the problem.

Any help would be very appreciated!
Thanks
Mark

[Patrick Wallek]

Did you get any errors when you did the 'pvcreate' of the disk?

What does 'diskinfo /dev/rdsk/c4t0d0' show? Is the size what you expect?

You might want to try doing a 'pvcreate -f /dev/rdsk/c4t0d0' to make sure the disk is getting pvcreated.

Also, you will probably want to take a look at the 'vgcreate' man page and change some of the defaults when you do your vgcreate. If you don't I can almost guarantee that it will fail. Specifically you will probably want to increase the 'PE Size' to 16MB or 32MB for a VG of this size.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

I must agree with Patrick. If the disk already has lvm information on it the pvcreate without the -f isn't going to do anything.

To check:
pvcreate /dev/rdsk/c4t0d0
echo $?

I bet you get a non-zero answer. That means the command failed.

SEP

[Sandman!]

Apart from the options mentioned in the previous posts it's possible that the disk is bad. Check for errors in syslog.log for that disk and/or run dd on that device file as follows:

dd if=/dev/dsk/c9t0d0 of=/dev/null bs=1024k count=10

[Mark Allen_3]

Ok.. this is what I tried..

I tried:
echo $? pvcreate /dev/rdsk/c4t0d0
Result:
0 pvcreate /dev/rdsk/c4t0d0

Then I tried:
vgcreate -f -s 32 /dev/vg01 /dev/dsk/c4t0d0 (-s from the man pages is for pe size)
- the resulted in the same error

Then I tried:
dd if=/dev/dsk/c9t0d0 of=/dev/null bs=1024k count=10
Result:
dd read error: Invalid argument
0+0 records in
0+0 records out

Then I tried:
diskinfo /dev/rdsk/c4t0d0
Result:
SCSI describe of /dev/rdsk/c4t0d0:
vendor: HP
product id: A6189B
type: direct access
size: 0 Kbytes
bytes per sector: 512


Hope this helps...
Mark

[Patrick Wallek]

Here is the main problem -- 'size: 0 Kbytes' from the diskinfo output.

That indicates that while the disk appears to be there, it is not totally accessable.

I would call the company you purchased this from and query them about what they did. The disk showing up as 0 KB in size on the HP-UX side is definitely NOT good.

[Torsten.]

Hi,

since the VA7410 is an array, there is not just a bad disk!

You are trying to create a physical volume on LUN 0.

It is strongly recommended never use LUN 0 on this type of array for data - just for configuration. For this reason the LUN 0 has normaly a size of 10~20 MB.

I would use commandview to check the status of the array (is the array secured - securemanager enabled ?), create a LUN 1 und create the PV and VG on this LUN.

[Sandman!]

Could you post the output of the following:

# ioscan -fn /dev/dsk/c4t0d0

~thanks

[Mark Allen_3]

# ioscan -fn /dev/dsk/c4t0d0

Results:
Class I H/W Path Driver S/W State H/W Type Description
========================================================================
disk 3 0/2/0/0.8.0.110.0.0.0 sdisk CLAIMED DEVICE HP A6189B /dev/dsk/c4t0d0 /dev/rdsk/c4t0d0

[Mark Allen_3]

One other thing I found:
If while in cvui, I list all LUN's I get the following:
(there should be 2 LUN's, Lun0 at 10mb and lun1 with remaining disk space)

Exec command: armdsp -L 50060b000008aa79 Vendor ID:______________________________HP Product ID:_____________________________A6189B Array World Wide Name:__________________50060b000008aa79 Array Serial Number:____________________00SG140G0067 Alias:__________________________________hparray Software Revision:______________________1.09.02 - 0191 - 060113 Command execution timestamp:____________Jan 4, 2007 3:41:42 PM ------------------------------------------------------------ CAPACITY Totals for Redundancy Group 1: REGULAR LUNs:_________________________0 bytes BUSINESS COPIES:______________________0 bytes