pSeries 7026-6H1 p660 2

[fluffybunny]

Hi,

I have a p660-6H1 server that I am having a problem with.

When it boots up, there is no available SCSI disks in the boot list. Does this mean that the disks are dead ?
I have gone in to the SMS menu and it does not list the disks.

What is wrong ?

Thank you in advance.

 

[plamb]

It can not find any BOOTABLE DISKS. Did this used to boot?? If so try to do a maintenenace boot using a bootable media or even NIM

 

[DukeSSD]

As plamb says, SMS will only show BOOTABLE disks. Either AIX is not installed, or the boot disk has failed (or the scsi controller, or the cable, etc).
If you do not have any AIX bootable media handy you can download an ISO of the diagnostics CD:

http://techsupport.services.ibm.com/server/mdownload/diags/download

 

[fluffybunny]

Hey guys,

Thanks very much. It was because the disks were not formatted. Did a diag and formatted the disks. Now they show up.

Thanks again.

 

[hfaix]

 

[DukeSSD]

Disks not formatted !!!
Hmm, that poses a few questions and a warning or two.
It is not good practice to format disks.
Were they "proper” RS6k disks / features ?
When a disk starts its life in a system it had been formatted by the "factory". This identifies any suspect areas of the disk and marks them as bad and reassigns those areas onto the spare sectors on the disk.
During the life of the disk the software and hardware associated with disk access will probably identify some more areas on the disk surface that are not up to parr, it will then "soft" reassign those areas.
When you format the disk you will lose those "soft reassignments".
The trouble with that is.... if there are several areas / sectors that were previously "soft reassigned" the next time that the disk finds these areas it may take it (the disk) over its "recovered error threshold" error limit in a very short space of time and the disk will PFA (issue a Predictive Failure Analysis alert) and disks can only do this once. Depending where you get the disk from it may have already gone past this threshold.
So you may decide that you will ignore all of the temporary errors and the associated diagnostic failures you get in the time shortly after the format and then the disk will seem to continue running without problems. But when ....later in life... it would have PFA'd you will miss it and just see a few temp errors, then.... bang...dead disk.
Make sure you are ready for a disk failure.

 

[plamb]

I have seen that before, like if the disks were part of a raid array

 

[DukeSSD]

Plamb,
Good point.
If that was the case, you have no option but to format them.
Just keep a careful eye on the errors. Take a backup at the first sign of trouble.

 

[fluffybunny]

Thanks for the heads-up DukeSSD, but the disks that were in the p660 were not preinstalled, so it didn't show up in the bootlist. Once the diagnostics were done, it was able to detect the hard disk, using the diag. CD.

Regards.