How do I know if a disk is blank? AIX 4.2

[szewczykm]

I'm having trouble with my system and I want to start over on it. I have 4 physical disks in the system. It >>SEEMS<< to me that HDISKs 1-3 are all unused. But before I start moving them around and overwriting them I want to make sure what I'm seeing is correct.

I want to make sure that they aren't being used as part of a mirror or some other thing that can't be seen while I'm in maintenance mode (boot from tape)

When I list the contents of the volume in SMIT I get a message that says the volume group must be varied on.

The volume group is &quot;vg1&quot; is this a default volume group that gets assigned when AIX discovers the device?

PV State, Stale Partitions, PP Size, Total PP's, Free PP's, etc.. all come back with ????????????????????

It wont let me import the VG. I'd be a little puzzled by our not using the disks, but we do have a big SSA enclosure with about 16 gigs of space (in 1996 that was amazingly huge) so it is possible they would have just saved the other 3 HDISK's in the system for future expansion.

SMIT gives me no information on Disk Arrays, so I don't know if they are RAID'ed. It's possible they aren't because then the SMIT screen would probably be there, but it's not.

Any help is appreciated.

Thanks,

Mike

 

[MoshiachNow]

HI,

I would try to guess if there is any definition on the block zero:

1.
# dd if=/dev/hdisk1 bs=1024 count=2|strings

The output could look like :

=>+*9V7P
=>+*9V7P
9#Pgrhdisk2
SEQWR12
eth1b107
MDHF4a
9#Pgrhdisk2
SEQWR12
eth1b107
MDHF4`
9#Pgrhdisk2
SEQWR12
eth1b107
MDHF4_
9#Pgrhdisk2
SEQWR12
eth1b107

This kind of gibberish would normally mean that some reasonable data was written once to the disk.

2.Also,can run the following to get any LV info from disk:

# lqueryvg -p hdisk1 -Atv

Max LVs: 256
PP Size: 25
Free PPs: 528
LV count: 2
PV count: 1
Total VGDAs: 2
Conc Allowed 0
MAX PPs per 1016
MAX PVs: 32
Conc Autovar 0
Varied on Co 0
Logical: 000c169d5a6d199b.1 backuplv 1
000c169d5a6d199b.2 loglv00 1
Physical: 000c169d9ca79eb1 2 0
VGid: 000c169d5a6d199b
Total PPs: 542


&quot;Long live king Moshiach !&quot;
h

http://www.noahide.com/movement.htm

 

[ProbablyDown]

lspv will tell you to which volume groups the disk belongs. If it says &quot;None&quot; you can safely say that it is blank (unless you have the ssa array hooked up to two machines, but thats a different story...)

 

[szewczykm]

There are volume groups defined on them, but I can't correlate any mounting to anything that's on these disks.

In my /etc/filesystems file, there's no mention of these devices at all.

 

[ProbablyDown]

lsvg -p <vgname>

PV_NAME PV STATE TOTAL PPs FREE PPs FREE DISTRIBUTION
hdiskx active 542 288


If the Total PPs are equal to the FREE PPs, the disk is empty...

 

[Yegolev]

lspv tells you physical volumes,
lsvg shows all vg
lsvg -l &quot;vgname&quot; shows lv in that vg
lsvg -p &quot;vgname&quot; show pv in that vg

You will have to do some analysis, unfortunately. I would say that if the vg is not varied on then you are not using it and it is prob OK to remove it. Export the vg first.

hth IBM Certified -- AIX 4.3 Obfuscation

 

[szewczykm]

Well, I was able to obtain 4 blank disks to use. So I'm working on a system restore onto new disks.

See followup message for more: Restoring my system from MKSYSB