Boot power4 system 9114-275 from AIX 5.1 CDs?

[catuser]

Hi,

We are trying to boot a power4 system 9114-275 from AIX 5.1 CDs? We had AIX 5.2 CD's originally but they are lost.

We have a couple of different 9114-275's and none of these systems will boot from these CDs.

We have set the CD device as the first item in the boot list in the open firmware.

Thank you!

 

[FrankieAIX]

Was this machine running AIX? What was the last running level on the machine?

Might sound silly, but are you trying to boot from a upgrade or maintenance CD set?


-FrankieAIX

 

[catuser]

Hi Frankie,

Thanks for your reply. All these machines were running AIX 5.2 before and this is a full set of install CD's.

The situation is that one machine will not boot from the HD which we are trying to replace - so we need to do a new install preferably from CD but - it will not boot from the AIX 5.1 CDs. Just to test we tried to boot our other machines of this type from CD and none of the 9114-275's will boot from these CDs. However, a 43P-170 can boot from the CDs just fine - IE there is nothing wrong with the CDs themselves.

Thanks again.

 

[khalidaaa]

IMHO You can't boot 5.2 using 5.1

 

[catuser]

Hi khalidaa,

We just want to do a complete overwrite - get the system up and running and we don't care if it is 5.2 or 5.1. We can do an upgrade later.

Is this possible or are you saying once we have 5.2 on the system we cannot go back to 5.1 even as a complete overwrite?

Thanks for your reply!

 

[khalidaaa]

Not 100% sure of that to be frank but i know that you can't boot AIX 5.2 from AIX 5.1 CDs!

I got your point by doing an overwrite. If i were you i would backup (mksysb) and then rm -r /* then try to boot from 5.1 CDs.

I hope someone over there clarifies this more

Regards,
Khalid

 

[catuser]

Hi khalidaaa,

Thanks for your fast reposnse but how would we do an rm -r /* if we cannot boot the system? We can't boot from the HDD - we have a dead one and we have a blank one. Also we can't boot from the only set of CD's we have for some reason.

We are going to try to so a NIM boot install but this will be a slow process since we haven't done it before. We also have a working AIX 5.1 install on another 9114-275. Can we just stick that drive in this machine?

Thanks in advance,

catuser

 

[cts123]

Hi catuser,

If your machine was running on AIX 5.2 and if you want to boot that machine with AIX 5.1 media, it won't boot. It sometime holds good for those cases too, if your server OS is at higher ML level and you are trying to boot that machine after crash with lower ML level media.

Only option is to boot the machine through your mksysb bootable tape if you have that or go for NIM option as you mentioned.

At this crysis moment if you have similar machine running with same OS AIX 5.2 rootvg mirror, you may use that disk ( after mirror break) in this machine and boot. It should work, I believe.

Regards,
Sam

 

[catuser]

Hi CTS123,

I appreciate your feedback very much as well as the other repliers so far. So how can I tell the ML of my media? I read this page which has some good info but it doesn't really answer my question?

http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/aix/library/au-dutta_work.html

Any ideas why it won't boot off older media? We now have a blank HDD. Does the AIX install modify the NVRAM?

Regards,
catuser

 

[DukeSSD]

From a quick google the 9114 needs 5.1 to be at least at ML04, so your CDs are probably at a ML less than this or the CD drive in the 9114 may be faulty because, as you say, your 7044 can boot from the CDs so you know the CDs are good.

If you have a mksysb or can take a mksysb from a similar system you might be able to install it on the system with the failed disk but the systems will need to be almost exactly the same for this to work.

Your other 9114 running 5.1 is probably at ML04 or higher, run 'oslevel -r' to check.

As for the mksysb, if the systems are almost exactly the same you might be able to move the 9114 5.1 disk over.

"almost exactly the same": if the ssytem you are trying to install has different adapters or devices then the disk or mksysb from another system won't have the required device drivers to support the new features. If the systems are the same bar the amount of memory, or say number of a particular adapter, i.e. one has one 6227 scai adapter and the other has two, you should be OK with either the disk swap or mksysb.

How does the CD boot attempt fail?
Error codes, etc?
Does the system seem to access the CD drive during the doot?
Does the CD access light flash for a while and the CD seem to be read at all?

 

[catuser]

Hi DukeSSD, everyone,

Thanks for your really helpful comments. I couldn't find that info on Google. Would you please help me know what to search for?

I tried "9114-275 requirements" "9114-275 ML" "Pseries requirements" "9114-275 supported"...usually Google is my friend but not with this.

I did find this link about an integrated SCSI controller but since it's not specifically about the machine I would have ignored it yesterday.

https://techsupport.services.ibm.com/server/mdownload/sisscsia050A007b.html#2.3

So yes our other 9114-275 is at ML04. We knew about oslevel -r. Too bad there doesn't seem to be the same sort of command for checking the media.

Do you have any advice on how we could run a mksysb and transfer it to to our machine? The 275 doesn't come with a SCSI connector!! We can't attach a tape drive even if we could drag a tape drive out of storage so I think this means we need to do the NIM business anyway right?


As far as how the boot fails - it just freezes after reading \\ppc\chrp\bootfile.exe Stays there forever.

Regards, catuser

 

[catuser]

Hi Guys,

We are trying the suggestion made by cts123. Put the drive in our working 5.1ML04 system. Mirror the rootvg to our new drive then break the mirror. The mirror part seemed OK but we didn't really know how to test it. However we think we made a mistake in the "breaking" part because when we put the drive back in the system that doesn't boot from CD it now has a new problem:

We go to the SMS and try to set the SCSI disk as the first boot device. It lets us select the SCSI ID. Then it says "Device not detected" or something like that. May be don't have a boot record in it now?

We followed suggestions from three places:

For mirroring:

http://www.pimpworks.org/ibm/aix.mirror.html

http://ramses.smeyers.be/varia/aix/mirrorrootvg/

For breaking:

http://unix.ittoolbox.com/groups/technical-functional/ibm-aix-l/breaking-the-rootvg-697834

Does anyone have good reference for how to do the mirror and break? Thanks again.

BTW. We have some CDs on order from ebay but we still really hope to get this working before they arrive. As a bonus if we can get the mirror to work we will have some of the programs we need installed.

 

[khalidaaa]

If the mirroring work then i suggest you do an alt_disk_install instead! It would be easier!?! Coz in the mirroring i think you need to disable the Qurom for it to work!

http://www.unet.univie.ac.at/aix/cmds/aixcmds1/alt_disk_install.htm

Regards,
Khalid

 

[p5wizard]

If you didn't clear the boot record manually after breaking the mirror (chpv -c), then the disk should still have a boot record and should still boot in the other server.

Sounds to me like either a bad scsi adapter/cable or loose scsi connection or faulty terminator...


HTH,

p5wizard

 

[cts123]

catuser,

How is it going? Did you do with Disk from the running system to this machine ? Or did some other process? I just curious to know about the final result.

Regards,

-Sam

 

[catuser]

Hi guys,

Thanks for following up. We gave up on the mirror - ran out of time. We tried a mksysb via mkcd as well. That kept failing on error code 0c31 - no console selected. We tried modifying bosinst.data a couple of times but I guess we just don't have enough practice at this stuff.

Got some 5.2 CDs from another office and got the machine booted. Sad, sad, sad...

I am going to go back to the mkcd thing when I get time - not during the next emergency I hope - because that seemed pretty promising.

Thanks for all you help!