pvcreate and mediainit failures

[Rachael Bendell]

I am currently setting up a machine to migrate a legacy system onto HP-UX 11i. I have been given an E55 with Jamaica disk array connected to 16-bit differential SCSI interface. There are 8 4GB disks in the enclosure supplied by HP.

My problem is that when I try the following I get the error stated below...

# pvcreate -f /dev/rdsk/c2t8d0
pvcreate: Could not perform LVM operation on VxVM disk "/dev/rdsk/c2t8d0".

Suggestions were made to perform a mediainit on the device because it had VxVM volumes on it.

So I performed the following and got the following error...

# mediainit /dev/rdsk/c2t8d0
scsi_mi: Unable to set EXCLUSIVE mode: Device busy


So does anybody have any ideas as to how I am supposed to use these disks?

[Michael Tully]

Have a look at this thread, it has some different suggestions.

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0x24b53a7b3682d611abdb0090277a778c,00.html

[James R. Ferguson · Accepted solution]

Hi Rachael:

Michael has pointed you to the use of /dev/zero to wipe the VxVM private region information from the disk. Try this and then do a 'pvcreate -f':

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdsk/cXtYdZ bs=64k count=10

With regard to 'mediainit', see this discussion:

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0xcd1e36e69499d611abdb0090277a778c,00.html

Regards!

...JRF...

[harry d brown jr]

2 devices with the same scsi id??

live free or die
harry

[Bill Hassell]

Standard troubleshooting: does any disk work? If not, unplug all of them except one and see if you can at least get diskinfo to work (diskinfo /dev/rdsk/c2t8d0).
If not, there is a much more basic problem going on.

Then half-split the disks by putting in about half and then run ioscan -fCdisk. Fo this a coupole of times to give ioscan a chance to update the kernel. Once the disks show up in ioscan, run diskinfo on each disk.

pvcreate requires a functional disk along with mediainit. ioscan and diskinfo are very simple SCSI commands that should isolate the problem.

[Rachael Bendell]

Thanks for your help.... It worked!!!!!!!

I did the following:

mknod /dev/zero c 3 0x000004 (as I am on 11.0)
chown bin:bin /dev/zero
chmod 666 /dev/zero

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/rdsk/c2t8d0 bs=64k count=10

pvcreate -f /dev/rdsk/c2t8d0

All completed within the space of how fast you can type as the dd came back straight away.

I am really glad I did not need to use mediainit!!!!!

Thanks again :-)