disk init fail on openvms alpha 6.2

[Ruisheng Peng]

Hi All,

We have a cluster of two Dec3000 M400 alpha (running OpenVMS 6.2) and one VAXstation 3100 M76 (running Openvms 6.0). There one pair of shadowed disk (RZ29B) on one of the alpha, and one of the disk went off line, either due to disk failuer or the enclosure power supply failure. Since I can't find another RZ29B to replace the failed one, I thought I'd set up another shadowed pair on the other alpha, and backup the existing shadow set.

The new shadow set has two IBM DDRS-3456 disks (4.56GB). They showed up at alpha system power up, as well as after system boot up. However, when I tried to initialize them, init fails, with a message of "device offline". This is true for both disks. I shutdown thew system, and put a jumper on pin #5 (enable auto spin, which was the factory setting, but I removed first time around). Boot up the system, the same thing: init fails. I'm puzzled on what I could have done wrong. I'm positive that the disks are fine. At the moment I get another pair of Seagate disks (ST15150N, 4.29GB) backing up the existing shadow set.

Thanks for any help and suggestions,

--Ruisheng Peng

[John Gillings]

Ruisheng,

Important thing to remember... none of the S's in "SCSI" stand for "Standard".

SCSI devices are notoriously picky about what other SCSI devices they will work with. If the disk in question is not explicitly mentioned as being supported, it isn't supported, and chances are it won't work (or worse it will *seem* to work, but will fail in an unpredictable, non-repeatable manner, and typically at the worst possible time).

Bottom line is you need to get a supported device.

(I'll leave Hoff to paste his standard response to this class of question, the essential message is the same)

[Hoff]

This looks to be a duplicate posting, see:

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1134526

[Antoniov.]

Hi,
I remember something about SCSI, old Alphaserver and IBM Disks.
Some years ago, I met the same problem with low end servers so I had to update SRM firmware. Latest version of SRM may support your IBM disks but I'm not sure about it.

Antonio
http://it.openvms.org

[Hoff]

Ok; I'll insert the usual disclaimer here. SCSI is less a standard than a standard collection of optionally implemented, creatively implemented, or even optionally misimplemented features. No two are ever exactly alike. You can spend your time dealing with the differences among SCSI implementations, or you can spend, say, US$50 to US$100 and get a BA356 box and a box-load of disks that almost certainly will work here.

As for changes, prior to V6.2, ARRE and AWRE settings were required to be disabled. With V6.2, OpenVMS adapts to the settings.

Prior to the SCSI-2 ECO involving disk sizes (ALPSCSI07_062), disks above 8.58 GB were not recognized for the full capacity -- there was a defacto extension to a field within the SCSI structures (where larger-capacity disks were overflowing an existing field into and were using an adjacent field that was reserved to tape devices by SCSI-2), and the earlier OpenVMS drivers were not cognizant of this particular SCSI-2 extension. This was added into the mainline in V7.1-2.

If the disk appears to the console and boots as far as trying to INITIALIZE it, then the console firmware is out of the path.

If you want to try your hand at random devices, do consider more current software. V6.2 is over a dozen years old; many things have changed since then (disks are larger than 8.58 GB), and more than a few incompatibilities have been addressed. And if you're going to get into this area of SCSI integration and testing (which can become a full-time career choice :-) ), you're going to become familiar with the SCSI T10 http://www.t10.org documents, with the SCSI error codes, and with the differences among SCSI devices.

I do like doing this device integration stuff -- been doing device-level and driver-level I/O for years. Sometimes it all works. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes a DMA controller path goes off the rails, or device firmware goes weird and does a two-byte skew. And sometimes you get surprised.

Stephen Hoffman
HoffmanLabs LLC

[Ruisheng Peng]

Thanks all for the replies.

As Hoff pointed out, it is indeed a duplicate thread--the forum system had a hiccup when I was submitting the first question. Thought that didn't go thru, I reposted it. Sorry for the confusion and duplication.

The problem of the IBM DDRS-3456 drives don't initialize is resolved following the suggestion of Vladimir on the other thread: applying the ALPSCSI08_062 ECO to the system. So I'm now rebuilt a new shadowset with the IBM disks.

I have had problems maintaining an healthy inventory of older disk drives, and the IBM drives was my last pair of matching disks. Do you have a reliable source of supply for DEC friendly drives? Hoff, the auctions you mentioned are on ebay? In addition to the RZ29, I also need to hunt down some 1GB drives for the system disk on the VAX...

Regards,

--Ruisheng Peng

[Ruisheng Peng]

This is essentially a duplicate thread, which was created when I submitted my first question. The forum system had a hiccup, saying something to the effect of submit failed. So I resubmit it. Combining replies from two threads, the problem was resolved. But there's some remaining issues of getting hardware for the older system...