How to find out how many Internal disks available on a system ?

[Vinod Subramanian]

The system has some internal and shared disks, how to find out what disks are internal to the system. I tried "ioscan -fC disk" but it gave me a listing of all the disks the system sees.

OS - 11.0

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi:

For hardware documention, see here:

http://docs.hp.com/hpux/hw/index.html

Regards!

...JRF...

[Patrick Wallek]

About the only way to determine which disks are internal and which are shared is to look at the path of each disk. There is no way for ioscan to determine what is internal and what is shared. It just sees disks.

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Hi,
You have to look at the column H/W path (and have an idea about which path is the internal bus).

[James R. Ferguson]

Hi (again):

Sorry, I thought you want specifications for how many disks could be internal...

/no points please/

...JRF...

[A. Clay Stephenson]

What you ask just ain't "doable".
For example on an old K-box, it's perfectly normal for internal and external disks to be on the same bus AND the SCSI ID's could be set to anything.

If you are able to distinguish them it's only because you know something about your particular system - and that's cheating.

[S.K. Chan]

Unless you map a hardware diagram (or architecture diagram) for that specify model of server that outlines each scsi paths, you'll not know. Lets take one example ..
L-class.
# ioscan -fn|grep ext
gives ..
ext_bus 0 0/0/1/0 c720 CLAIMED INTERFACE SCSI C896 Fast Wide LVD
ext_bus 1 0/0/1/1 c720 CLAIMED INTERFACE SCSI C896 Ultra Wide Single-Ended
ext_bus 2 0/0/2/0 c720 CLAIMED INTERFACE SCSI C875 Ultra Wide Single-Ended
ext_bus 3 0/0/2/1 c720 CLAIMED INTERFACE SCSI C875 Ultra Wide Single-Ended
ext_bus 4 0/3/0/0 c720 CLAIMED INTERFACE SCSI C875 Fast Wide Differential
ext_bus 5 0/6/0/0 c720 CLAIMED INTERFACE SCSI C875 Fast Wide Differential
Since I'm familiar with this server I know the first 4 paths points to the SCSI slots accessible from the front panel of the CPU(hence internal).

[Helen French]

For any solution to your question, it's important that you understands the h/w path of disk controllers and disks. If you know which controller, what path and which disks, disk arrays, then it's easy to identify the internal and external disks.

An easy to find graphical picture can be obtained from:

# stm

For more details about h/w path, controllers and the disk connected, look at SAM. These two methods are more easy and useful if you are not very good at command line utilities.

One *non-professional* way to identify a particular disk will be to run a "dd" on it and find it's LED (light) indication:

# dd if=/dev/dsk/cxtydz of=/dev/null
A continuous read light on a particular disk will make it identifyable (not very accurate though). You can interrupt the process and run again to confirm if needed. This is not a supported way, but did help me a lot time.

[Sunil Sharma_1]

Hi,

There is no way system (OS) can diffentiate between internal and external disk.
The best way to find out is stm which will give you graphical presentation.

and it also depend on type of external disks connected if you have EMC storage as external disk storage then in ioscan you will fine EMC in model and HP/Segate for internal disks.

there is no clear difference and it can be found out only by exper.
Sunil

[malay boy]

no point please...

hehehehe :-) I always used the Shiju Wilson method.The *non* professional one.But worked like charm.

Do a dd command then see the light.Simple as that.
I wonder does this work for Disk Array ?.
uhm!!!! I don't think so.

regards
mB

[Ian Dennison_1 · Accepted solution]

Here's a script plus its config file that I wrote last year.

It recognised XP512 Disks through a Fibre Channel Controller, AutoRaid 12H, FC60, and the remainder are classed as HAS.

The model classification should give you an idea.

Files reside in following directories by default

/operations/bin/diskinventory.sh
/operations/etc/disktypes

Share and Enjoy! Ian