mikerault
What is this storage?
So...you got a dream price for a batch of SCSI drives, they have arrived and you put them in your system. They spin-up the POST on the HBA seems to say thy are up and running but the system won't recognize them and pretends they aren't even there. What now?
CHances are you have run afoul of what I call the CLariion effect. EMC manufactures (amoung others) the Clariion disk array. The disks in a Clariion are specially formatted at 520 vice 512 K per sector. In addition EMC usually modifies the ROM on the disks them seleves to "optimize" it and then charges you 2-3K extra for these optimized disks. When salvage companies absorb these huge arrays they break them up into cabinets and disks and sell them seperately.
Other manufacturers may also cause the Clariion effect but EMC is the most prevalent. It is easy to tell if your disks have the Clariion effect present because the programming will affect the model number as reported to the OS a normal 74 GB fibre channel disk from Seagate will report:
SEAGATE Model: ST173404FC in the proc/scsi/scsi file of a Linux sytem
A Seagate suffering from the Clariion affect will report:
SEAGATE Model: ST173404FC CLAR72
Easy you say, I will just use the low level format from my disk controller/HBA to reformat the drive. Maybe this will work, maybe it won't. On my system using an older card it reported that it successfully formatted the drive but the system still wouldn't recognize it.
The only solution I found to work was to download the SG series of utilities from http://fresh.t-systems-sfr.com/linux/src/sg3_utils-1.25.tgz/
You download the version for your Linux system then after using gunzip to expand the file and tar -xvf to unbundle it you cd into the top level directory and issue:
./configure
make
make install
The you can then use the sg_format command to "force" the format to the proper 512:
sg_format --size=512 --format /dev/sg1 &
many thanks to "Nobby" on blogspot.com for his tip on using sg_format.
Have fun!
CHances are you have run afoul of what I call the CLariion effect. EMC manufactures (amoung others) the Clariion disk array. The disks in a Clariion are specially formatted at 520 vice 512 K per sector. In addition EMC usually modifies the ROM on the disks them seleves to "optimize" it and then charges you 2-3K extra for these optimized disks. When salvage companies absorb these huge arrays they break them up into cabinets and disks and sell them seperately.
Other manufacturers may also cause the Clariion effect but EMC is the most prevalent. It is easy to tell if your disks have the Clariion effect present because the programming will affect the model number as reported to the OS a normal 74 GB fibre channel disk from Seagate will report:
SEAGATE Model: ST173404FC in the proc/scsi/scsi file of a Linux sytem
A Seagate suffering from the Clariion affect will report:
SEAGATE Model: ST173404FC CLAR72
Easy you say, I will just use the low level format from my disk controller/HBA to reformat the drive. Maybe this will work, maybe it won't. On my system using an older card it reported that it successfully formatted the drive but the system still wouldn't recognize it.
The only solution I found to work was to download the SG series of utilities from http://fresh.t-systems-sfr.com/linux/src/sg3_utils-1.25.tgz/
You download the version for your Linux system then after using gunzip to expand the file and tar -xvf to unbundle it you cd into the top level directory and issue:
./configure
make
make install
The you can then use the sg_format command to "force" the format to the proper 512:
sg_format --size=512 --format /dev/sg1 &
many thanks to "Nobby" on blogspot.com for his tip on using sg_format.
Have fun!
