Adding Hard Drives to 7026-6H1 3

[ChuckerBob]

Currently we have a couple of 6H1s that have 2 18.2 GB hard drives in them. The 2 drives are mirrored. We want to add 2 additional 36.4 GB hard drives in them, and use the new drives to expand onto the existing drives, because we are very close to being out of space.

Example:

We have hdisk0 and hdisk1 (mirrored)
We would like to add the new drives so that hdisk0 and hdisk2 appear as one large physical volume and hdisk1 and hdisk3 appear as one large physical volume, then mirror the hdisk0/hdisk3 pair to the hdisk1/hdisk3 pair.

Can this be done? and how? or is there a better way to add these to expand my storage capacity and maintain a mirrored config?

I am hoping that I can do this without having to wipe the data from the existing hdisk0 and hdisk1. I realize that I will need to break the existing mirrorand I know that if I need to wipe the existing drives, I can restore form mksysb tapes (that I will make prior to doing this.

Thanks in advance.
Chuckerbob

 

[DukeSSD]

The 6H1 only has space for 2 physical drives.

 

[DukeSSD]

Probably your best bet would be to take a mksysb and then swap the 18GB drives for the 36GB drives.
Restore the mksysb and re-mirror the drives.

 

[ChuckerBob]

Thanks for the input.
I have a document from a contractor that used to work with me, that stated that the 6H1 had 4 drive bays.
If there are only 2 then that solves that problem: mksysb's - swap drives - restore - mirror, just like you said.
Thanks again.

 

[CrystalWizard]

The problem you are facing is that right now, your volume group on those drives is set up for 18 gig drives. Your partition size is set for 18 gig drives and you can't change it.

you COULD expand the vg onto those drives right now if you want, but AIX will partition them as if they were 18 gig drives and you'll lose over 1/2 your drive space.

If you want to use them as 30 gig drives, the cleanest way is to back up the data, delete the vg, recreate it on the 30 gig drives, then restore the data to it.

 

[plamb]

or install 36gb drive then do alt_disk_install to it