How to do fresh install w/new drives?

[BobMCT]

Here's one I've not been personally involved with before. Hopefully some AIX guru's here can advise?

In my RS6K F80 I had a zillion, actually 12, 9.1GB SSA drives in the system unit. I purchased four 72.3 GB SSA drives and pulled all the other drives out then inserted the four 72.3GB drives in slots 1-4. At that point I inserted the IBM install CDrom vol 1 and rebooted. Of course it cannot see the new drives or any drives for that matter. As I am not familiar with how the SSA connections work how do I identify these drives to the system so I can do a fresh install?

When I boot into services mode (SMS) it appears the system cannot see them from here either?

Suggestions? Thanks in advance.

 

[khalidaaa]

I'm no AIX guru and I didn't work with SSA but i can guide you thru some reading stuff:

http://lux1000.rz.hs-wismar.de/~diehn/ssa.htm

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/cgi-bin/searchsite.cgi?query=ssa+AND+configuration

Regards,
Khalid

 

[unixfreak]

Maybe you need a frmware update? You should check on IBM's website. Also, do they just slot in or did you move any connectors? Are they 8 disk bays?

 

[LeePatto]

Hi, we had this problem on a p520. The version of AIX was too low, and did not have the SSA functionality. Upgraded the version of AIX (5.3 in this case), and we could see the SSA Disks. What version of AIX are you at?

Thanks

 

[Breslau]

Agree on the firmware advice. if the box is not at the latest and you try to install 5.3 you get some funkiness with the box's NVRAM.

it's been a few years since i have used SSA drives, but when we did have them, they were in drawers external to the host, accessed via an HBA and some cables. is this what you're doing, and you have no scsi drives inside the system?

 

[BobMCT]

Thanks for the recommendations, gents;

The box has NO scsi drives internally. The entire backplane is SSA only. There are two SSA adapters installed, each with four connectors. On the first connectors A1+B1 connect externally to the back plane adapters. The other one used to connect to an external 7133 array which is no longer connected or in use.

I had IBM maintenance come in and upgrade the firmware to the latest level last week. All the drives originally installed were 9.1GB and there was insufficient room to do a system restore(even with the shrink filesystems set to Y). So I purchased four 72.3GB SSA drives and inserted them into slots 1-4. Using SMS I set the boot devices to 1) CDROM; 2) TAPE. With only the CDROM inserted and booting up it always results in the SMS menu and everything I try to do states NO DISKS FOUND.

This is where I am at this moment.

Bob

 

[Breslau]

Have you verified that the HBA's are supported for the level of OS you're attempting to install?