vgcreate problems with direct-attached FC drives under hp-UX 11i

[Doug Lucy]

I have a "new" rp8400 with 2Gb FC connection to (3) 2405 JBODs in a private loop. The 2405s are all set to 2Gb/s and they all have (14) 73Gb FC drives in them.

With a brand new install of HP-UX 11.11 OE, I can "see" all the FC drives in SAM, I can select them and try to build a VG, PVG and LVs, but it always takes a long time and ends with vgcreate errors "/dev/dsk/c6t0d0 contains no LVM information".

It's odd that the "looking for volume groups" and "searching for unmounted filesystems" takes a long time leading up to this failure, too.

The only strange fact in all of this is the drives in the 2405 JBODs were attached originally to this rp8400 server through a VA7400 Virtual Array. Sadly, the VA7400 has a component problem and refuses to stand up, so I moved the 2405s to be directly attached.

What am I doing wrong? Why can't I get the vgcreate to "take?"

Thanks in advance.

[Torsten. · Accepted solution]

Hi,

the disks connected to a VA7xxx are formated with 520 Byte blocks. The OS cannot use this size.
You need to install CommandView SDM (the same as for the VA) and re-format the disks to 512 byte blocks.

Once this is done, you can the the "plain" disks again.

[Doug Lucy]

The problem was, indeed, that the disks had been formatted to 520 byte sectors while in the VA7400 array. I had to connect the 2405 enclosures to a server, install Commandview SDM, run ioscan, instf, armdiscover, and then I could use JBODdsp to find the drives and JBODfmt to format them.