Swapping out a bad disk.

[Scott Buckingham]

General question:

It's been awhile since I've had to replace a bad hard disk with a new one, but never on Unix. Is this a big deal? Or should I have a qualified tech handle it? We're trying to save some money here (thus no service contract to cover this). We would be replacing a 4GB SCSI-2 on a HP-9000, K250 utilizing the HP-UX 10.20 OS.

P.S. This thread has been moevd from Disk to HP-UX > sysadmin. - Hp forum Moderator

[paul courry]

As long as you have full backups! You did not mention whether this puppy was part of vg00 or not. If it is a make_recovery -A would be an excellent idea.

[Scott Buckingham]

This fs is assigned to /dev/vg84 and as far as I can tell, it was only used for Oracle archiving logs. Anything I should be wary of? Will there be any resetting of the kernel or anything like that after the swap?

[Roger Baptiste · Accepted solution]

Hi,

From your post, it seems that the disk
in "internal" to the system. Which means that, you would need to bring the system down to
replace the disk.
For a K-box, the disk cage is easily accessible. Open the front cover and pull
the cage out and replace it. As simple as that.
Make sure you cable it exactly as the old/bad
disk. Also, check if there are any scsi switch settings on the disks and make it identical as it is on the old disk. Also
shut the card cage firmly back. Sometimes,
i have had issues with the cage not being
firmly held on to the backend.
Once the system boots , interrupt the
boot and from the ISL do a search to
see whether the disk is visible. (command
is SEARCH). This way you save time, rather
than waiting for the whole boot process to
check the disk. This much is from the H/W
angle.
Once the system is up, do an ioscan -nf
and check the disk path and make sure
it is the same as the previous one. Do a Diskinfo on the path to confirm it. Then, do a vgcfgrestore -n vg84 /dev/dsk/cxtydz
to make it a part of the vg.
Do a pvdisplay on the disk to make sure
it is ok.

For more details, you can look up this
document:KBAN00000347.

Nothing else will change. It's a smooth process, both H/W wise and S/W wise.

-Raj

[Scott Buckingham]

Thanks, Raj! These are some excellent instructions! As soon as I get a new drive in house and I can free up a Saturday morning, I'll give it a try (and I'll try to remember to let you know how it went).

- Scott