drive testing from comand line -mediainit help

[Steven Bucek]

I need to test several a5234a's (18gig fibre channel) before putting them in production. For testing I have a 'c' box with 11.i connected to an FC10. Can I use mediainit to bulk test/initalize all the drive at once or do I need to do each one by itself? What would be the best options to use with mediainit to ensure good testing? Using STM I can excerise the drives with a read/write test with no problems, but if I try to add any drives into volume groups i get IO errors. How do YOU guys test drives before using them? any comments appreciated.

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi Steve,

Only test that I believe in is the 'dd' . Do the dd continuously and if you don't get any IO errors, then you can call it a good disk.

dd if=/dev/rdsk/cxtydz of=/dev/null bs=1024k

-Sri

[Sanjay_6]

Hi Steve,

WE do not use mediainit anymore. WE hardly run into problems. Most of the time, once the disk allocation is done, we go ahead and start using it (adding to VG and creating lvs etc). Till date i wasn't required to do stm exercise on it even once.

Hope this helps.

Regds

[Sundar_7]

Hi Steve,

If you really want to do serious disk drive testing, go for ODE (Offline Diagonstics Environment).

dd does just a plain read of the drive, which is OK in most of the cases.

ODE can do extensive pattern reading/writing tests, after which you can be dead sure the drives are OK.

The only disadvantage with ODE I see is that it is labor intensive. you will have to reboot the system, get in to the ISL prompt, load ODE and run the tests. You can not script it or something.

Let me know if this is something you want to look at. I can point you the directions.

- Sundar.

[Bill Hassell]

STM is the best way to test the drives online. mediainit performs *NO* testing at all. Years ago, the mfr's all decided that they would do the disk initialization and track sparing internally so all that mediainit does is to start the init task inside the drive and look for a return code--no diagnostic information at all.

There's something wrong with adding the drives into volume groups if you're getting errors that do not show up with STM. vgcreate, lvcreate and newfs do almost nothing to the disk (a few sectors are written) so errors at that point means that addressing is wrong or something strange is happening with the LVM commands.

[Steven Bucek]

Sundar; I am very interested in the ODE, is there a link you can point me to with more info?

Thanks everyone for the replys!

[Sundar_7]

Steve,

Refer the Offline Diagnostics section in http://docs.hp.com/hpux/diag/index.html

You can use ODE in couple of ways

1) Copy ODE utils to the boot disk and boot from it.

/usr/sbin/diag/lif/updatediaglif* files contain the ODE lif volumes and utilities. Use mkboot to copy them to the boot disk.

2) Boot from the support plus CD and use ODE from the CD. The ODE tools available from the LIF volume mentioned above are "non-destructive" tools. The ODE tools in the Support plus CD also include destructive tools.

- Sundar