physical volume contains no lvm

[Victor BERRIDGE]

Hi Bill,
Please to hear from you on the subject:
That was my first thought, but shouldnt you see under HPUX the disk as failed in such case?
The last time I had something of the sort: the disk was OK even in stm, I had scsi mad resets... and so the box crashed because of panic (swap...).
Enlighten me!!

Thanks in advance

All the best
Victor

[Bill Hassell]

After years of looking at disk failures, they have educated me that anything can fail and usually does. The simple disk failures are head crashes or other bad spots on the disks, but the worst are controller failures. Sometimes, the electronics in the disk will lockup the entire SCSI bus, taking everything with it. Other times, the controller reads without error but never writes anything even though the status indicates success.

So the lack of syslog error messages indicates that the driver is happy with the responses but in no way validates the health of the disk. Inchecking the health, I would start with the basics: ioscan -f and diskinfo will test SCSI ID comands, while dd will read the raw disk regardless of content. If those don't work or return strange values, no need to try anything else.

One thing: Is the c6t0d0 disk internal or a simple external JBOD disk, or is it part of a SAN? Improperly configured access or LUNs on the SAN can create strange errors like this.

[Josiah Henline]

# diskinfo /dev/rdsk/c6t0d0
SCSI describe of /dev/rdsk/c6t0d0:
vendor: HP
product id: A6189B
type: direct access
size: 0 Kbytes
bytes per sector: 512

The 0KB size means that your LUN has no space allocated to it. It may need to be recreated. You can run a diskinfo on other LUNs that are part of the A6189B to see if it is the only misconfigured LUN. Also, make sure that the LUN is created to be the same size as the device you are mirroring it to.

The array you are using may support hardware RAID which may be used instead of LVM mirroring.

[Bill Hassell]

Sorry I did not look carefully at the model number. A6189B is a Virtual Array 7110 which means that it is not a real disk at all (a JBOD of Just a Bunch Of Disks). So until you run the VA manager to make some amount of storage available to the LUN, it will be size zero. So there is likely no disk failure at all, it is working correctly. Just have your disk storage admionistrator configure the RAID level and storage for your LUN.