how to recreate raw devices

[Hector Vargas]

hello forum,

I am installing oracle RAC on two hpux servers and an EVA 6000 storage. the share luns has been created and shared-presented to the both server but when I try to create the database RAC, I get an error messages that the raw devices belong to and old disk group.
My question is how can I clean whatever data exist on the raw devices?

[DCE]

Do a pvcreate -f against the luns before you create the lv's for raw devices........

[A. Clay Stephenson]

If you do a pvcreate, you will wipe out any existing meta-data and you will have to recreate the entire volume group from scratch. Only in the case where you actually want to erase all meta-data would you execute pvcreate -f. If you have already initialized the data and are now trying to actually share the raw volumes between members of the RAC then you want to use the vgimport command on all nodes except the first node. The vgimport will display warnings about the VG not being created on this host but that is normal, expected, and true.

This is actually the downside to using raw devices. It is extremely difficult to know that the raw device are actually unused -- so it is incumbant upon all parties to be extremely careful. Bear in mind, that even if the device in not in use by a database, it might still be a raw device used by another application.

[Hector Vargas]

Thanks,

I actually used
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdsk/c4t4d3 bs=4194304