System can't recognise any disks.

[Allan_42]

Hi folks - if anyone could advise I'd be very grateful. We're building a new system - disks are powered on - cable's are good but the disks aren't recognised at all. Ran ARC - they show all disks failed. Am unable to make 'em optimal and we have no prior configuration to fall back on. Any suggestions ?
Thanks in advance

[Uwe Zessin]

Allan,

if you mention "ARC" it _sounds_ like you are running on an AlphaServer with a backplane RAID controller (making disk drives "optimal"). Forgive me, but I really don't like to spend too much time with guessing. Please provide more information about your hardware configuration.

[Allan_42]

Forgive me Uwe - our resident VMS sys admin guy left us (we're winding down as a company) and all that's left is one or two people and neither of us are familiar with VMS.
Yes, we're running Alpha 800 with a backplane raid. Initially on reboot none of the 4 disks could be seen (sh dev d) nor could ARC see them. I've since stripped down the disk chassis and reseated everything. ARC now see's the 4 disks (2x9gig 2x18gig)all in RDY state but a sh dev d at the chevron prompt shows they aren't there.
The disk light indicator does now flicker during reboot. I think party of the initial prob was incorrect power down sequence which I am reading these systems don't like.
I'm sorry - my lack of technical VMS skills precludes me from being able to volunteer any more information.
Thanks in advance.

[Uwe Zessin]

Hello Allan,

that's sad to hear...

Let me see if I can help anyway with the new information.

If this is a new configuration or the RAID controller has lost its configuration, you need to create new RAID sets. You do that by going into ARC, inserting the appropriate floppy disk and running a maintenance program. From there you have a menu-driven environment.

I suggest you look for the set of floppy disks and small binders.

[Uwe Zessin]

outch! I should have taken my morning coffee, first.

Of course, if you see the disk drive as RDY, you are already running the configuration utility, sorry.

The next thing to configure the system is to define 'drive groups' - that tells the system what disk drives belong together. Then you create the logical drives (LD) within the drive groups. The system will later see the LD as a disk device (e.g. DRA0:). Now you need to initialize all logical drives to force RAID consistency. You can define a spare drive and finally save the configuration and/or an ASCII output to floppy disk.

I don't know if your backplane RAID controller has a battery backup for the cache, but during the logical disk initialization I suggest you at least temporarily enable the writeback-caching - it will speed up the process.