How to Set Up Model 20 Disk Array

[glennes]

I have an HP 9000 K370 with a Model 20 'nike' rack mounted disk array. The unit has 20 4GB drives in it. I have no idea how these 20 disks were configured when the machine was used in production and there is nothing on these disks that is worth keeping, including the existing logical structure on the array. For my purposes, I do not need to set up a RAID and would like to use the array as either a single volume (80 GB) or mirror it as two 40GB units designed for HP-UX OS file systems and HP-provided application software.

This will always be a single user (sandbox) system with no DBMS software (eg. Oracle) nor any non-HP application software installed on it and no networked multi-user setup. 16 of the drives in the array show with green LEDs with four of the drives showing yellow FAULT LEDs. I do not know if these drives are actually bad or if they are showing a fault status for some other reason. At any rate, I do not need all 20 drives. I can use the ones that are good. However, the internal 4GB drive the system boots from is too small to accommodate any additional OS files and application software, so i need to take advantage of the additional disk space on the disk array drives for this purpose.

How do I go about cleaning and setting up these drives as they were when they were new with nothing on them and set them up to use any available space for files and HP applications? Even though I do not want to use the array as a boot device, I have tried starting with the Core OS Install CD and cold installing the entire system onto the array. I have tried including several of the array drives in the install selection process for disk space allocations when running the core install, but the installer reports errors with pvcreate:

ERROR: Command: "/sbin/pvcreate -f  /dev/rdsk/c5t1d0" failed         

When trying to create volume group: vg00, the system responds with

vgcreate: Physical Volume "/dev/dsk/c5t1d0" contains no LUM information

and the vgcreate process stops with the only option to reboot the system.

The internal 4GB drive already has the HP-UX OS on it and the system will boot from it. I do not need the system to boot from the array and I do not need an elaborate volume system or RAID on the array - I just want to take the most efficient path to give the system access to the entire 80 GB or as much of it as can be accommodated with the OS seeing the available disk space (up to 80 GB) as a single drive, respecting the limitations of the disk array for this purpose. Again, I would prefer to leave it set up with the internal drive as the root boot drive and use the array purely for additional OS space and application files rather than using it as a boot device, if possible. This would be not unlike formatting a new hard drive in a PC and setting up physical volume spanning software so that the system sees more than one physical drive as a single logical volume/drive.

Can this be done in a straightforward fashion? What is the procedure?

Thanks!

Glenn