RP8400 to RP8420 upgrade

[Jakes Louw]

Has anybody out there gone through one of these?
Our Customer Engineer is using a doc called "Upgrade Guide: HP 9000 rp8400 Server to HP 9000 rp8420 Server, Third Edition", part # A9785-96004, March 2004.

Then he has 2 other smaller extracts from docs A9612-96006:"HP PA-8800 Based Server Patch Requirements", and A9785-96002:"HP I/O Hardware Path Upgrade".

Anything else?
Things that aren't covered by the docs?
Special tricks and considerations?
Things to panic and worry about?

[Bruno Ganino]

for others documents
http://docs.hp.com/hpux/hw/
HTH
Bruno

[V.Tamilvanan]

Hi,
Look into this link. May help you.

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=485072

[Jakes Louw]

Just some feedback on this:

The attempted chassis and cell-board upgrade was a disaster. Firstly, some of the new hardware was faulty right out of the box.
Secondly, no matter what was attempted, the boot would fail while attempting to find primary swap.

Bear in mind, this is the SAME boot disk as used and set up when the RP8400 config was in use. And an eventual hardware regression was successfull.

Go figure. HP has some homework to do over here.

Attached is my draft action list if somebody is ineterested....

[Frederic Sadoun]

Hi,

We had the same problem...
The first thing to do is to set the kernel parameter "swapmem_on" to 1 (disable dump if volume is unusable).

Next, you need to load the "c8XX" driver into kernel because the internal contoler is a new one (it's why the server don't boot...).

Finally, if the server is part of a cluster, you need to compile again the cluster binary (even if you use the hwpath_chg script to fix the ioconfig file)because the hardware path of lan cards is hard coded into it...

Hope this help !
Fred

[Jakes Louw]

Hi Frederic

I should have posted a properclosure to this. Here are some of the problems we ran into:

- Hardware supplied for the upgrade was completely DISASTROUS!!!! We had 2 faulty cell boards in the batch.
- Watch the version of Ignite: this proved crucial