FC10 Mediainit failures

[Dane Van Steenwyk]

I was just wondering if anyone could help me out. I have a Surestore FC10 with A5627A 73GB disk drives in it and I am trying to do a mediainit -v to format them and it starts for about 2 min. then it stops and says:
I/O command failed
Am I doing something wrong? Any info would be much appreciated. Thanks.

[Bernhard Mueller]

Looks like the disk has a bad spot. In fact you should not run mediainit at all.

you can verify the disk running several times:
dd if=/dev/rdsk/cXtYd0 of=/dev/null bs=1024k

if it gives an I/O error each time after reading the same number of blocks, you should definitely replace the disk.

Regards,
Bernhard

[Dane Van Steenwyk]

Thanks for the reply. Is that dd commmand the right way to test drives then? I have been told to do a mediainit to format drives but then I have read that it is bad to do so which is also what you are saying. I guess I just want to know the right way to fully test a hard drive to make sure it is clean and 100% good. Any thoughts?

[Andrew Rutter · Accepted solution]

hi,

I wouldnt do a media init on any drives nowadays. you dont need to do that on new disks. A colleague of mine nearly destroyed some 73gb drives in an fc10 doing what your doing. They were unusable in hpux after he had finished and seen as 0mb. The best way in hpux is the dd command, either /dev/zero or /dev/random if you have it installed. This will test the functionality of the drive. Even better still is on a pc based system.

mediainit was used many years ago when the disks didnt have as good controllers and the disks where alot smaller in size. running it on a 73gb took about 4hours to complete aswell.

andy