pvcreate hang, why?

[Wayne Yu_1]

We have a A180 server, which has a A4999A LVD card. On that card, there are two 73GB LVD SCSI drives. I created a vg on those two drives and mirrored them, everything was working.

Yesterday, we had a system crash. I ended up reinstall the OS part. After install the OS part, I restored from the tape and I could access the vg01 on those two LVD drives. But other parts was
totally not right. So I backup all the data on vg01 and start a total reinstall.

The two internal drives are working fine, I can over write them without any problem, but those two LVD drives on A4999A would not allow me to do pvcreate. I could vgimport them, but the mount insisted the file system are totally corrupted.

So I decided to wipe them out and start the vg01 totally. But pvcreate kept hang. I did mediainit to wipe the drives. For 73GB drives, it took almost three hours to get them complete. But after that I still could not do pvcreate on them.
pvcreate /dev/rdsk/c0t6d0
just hang and does not give error or return.

What could be wrong? Thanks for all your helps.

[Ashwani Kashyap]

When you do pvcreate , does it come out with any error message .

Have you tried pvcreate -f /dev/rdsk/c0t6d0 .

Can you do a diskinfo on that disk ?

Is the disk physically bad ?
Do a dd on that disk . Use
# dd if=/dev/rdsk/c0t6d0 of=/dev/null .

If it it pops up with an error than you have a bad disk.

[harry d brown jr]

What's powering the drives? Because an A4999A is just a scsi card.

I have never had to use mediainit.

What was the pvcreate and mount errors? Did you check your cabling?? Make sure your scsi card is secure?

and on an A180, /dev/rdsk/c0t6d0 is your INTERNAL disk drive, most likely your ROOT disk!!!

live free or die
harry

[Wayne Yu_1]

pvcreate did not give any error, just hang for hours not return. the only way to get rid of it is to reboot. Drives are good, both went through mediainit fine. they are new HP drives made by seagate only used for two months.

during mediainit, I saw the lights on the drives were blinking. so I assume they were talking. Besides, it was okay when I used the restored lvmtab and vg information to active the vg01(which has these two drives in it only) and mount them. But since I tried to wipe them out, I could not do it.

I wish pvcreate would tell me what is waiting for, it just hang there can be not killed.
no error message of any kind.

[Wayne Yu_1]

Also, ioscan -funC disk shows the drives fine. So the SCSI are talking to each other. What pvcreate do and not return is a puzzle.

[harry d brown jr]

and on an A180, /dev/rdsk/c0t6d0 is your INTERNAL disk drive, most likely your ROOT disk!!!


Did you miss that?


Just because ioscan returns some stuff doesn't mean things are working! You can ioscan all day long on a dead disk drive, but the first time you try to do anything with that disk it will hang your process. You either have a scsi bus issue or a dead disk!

live free or die
harry

[T G Manikandan]

Do a swconfig \* to make sure filesets are configured.
Check whether you have the
latest LVM patches on the system.
Install the latest patch bundle.

Thanks

[Wayne Yu_1]

Not true. /dev/dsk/c0t6d0 is not root disk. For some reason the 11.0 put the external cards first. the root disk (internal drive) is /dev/dsk/c2t6d0.

The way A180 handle the I/O are troublesome for us. We have DLT library connected to an A4880A card on that system. I made Ignite tape on that DLT, but all drives on the PCI cards are not show up on the BCH search result, so I had to reinstall the OS.

[Wayne Yu_1]

I did have latest patch installed and there is no software unconfigured.

If there is a hardware problem, I doubt both hard disk would gone at the same time. Mediainit was talking to disk and actually issued format command to the disk and both disks were performed that task and okay.

The fact that I was able to mount those file systems after taring off the 2nd image from the ignite tape make me believe nothing was actually wrong in the hardware. All the problem I had at that time was the root volume was screw up by fresh install and tar off the ignite tape 2nd image from the tape.

However, after install all new OS and applied all the latest patches, I was able to vgimport that logic volume and I was able to do vgdisplay and lvdisplay on that. But mount would not work complaing the file system was corrupted. At that point, I tried newfs and it would not work saying the disk belongs to a VG. So I did vgexport to get rid of the vg and pvcreate the drives, that pvcreate just hang, so I power off the system and power on. then pvdisplay kept saying those two disk are in POWERFAIL. Even the power was not off. The only way for me to get rid of the POWERFAIL was mediainit. After that I was not able to pvcreate. But pvdisplay showing them not belongs to any VG.

Is there any diagonistic tool that i could use to really tell which piece hardware has problem? I just could not believe two hdds are gone at the same time, while it still respond to mediainit.

[Wayne Yu_1]

Never mind and thanks for all the suggestions. I tried to tightened the screws on the micro-scsi connector for a quarter of turn, now pvcreate comes back immediately.

I hate those little scsi connectors, they are not good enough -- if you tight too much, it will break -- I broke two of them already. But if you don't tight them just right before they break, it could not make good contact! Just a quater of turn!