Hello System Admins,
How is is possible that I can access and use disks on a system whose
kernel has not been configured to "know" about them?
I've received a DS20 with a single-channel raid controller, seven
storageworks disks, and factory-installed Tru64 v4.0f. The kernel's
configuration file showed these disks:
# grep disk /sys/conf/MYSYSTEM
device disk re0 at xcr0 drive 0
device disk fd0 at fdi0 drive 0
When I boot using the kernel that shipped with the system, the
disk re0 (a JBOD) is the only "re" type disk scrolling across the
screen (during the boot sequence). I ran the Raid Config Utility
to define the other JBOD disks to the controller (re1, re2, re3, etc),
then ran MAKEDEV to create their device files in /dev. Just for the
heck of it (and BEFORE I added additional disk entries to the kernel
config file to build a new kernel) I tried using disklabel, mkfdmn,
mkfset, and mount to one (re1) of these "unknown" disks. To my
surprise all of these commands worked. Even writing files to the disk
was no problem.
Afterwards, I booted the generic kernel and ran sizer to get what it
thought the entries should be for those disks. I added them to the
system config file (/sys/conf/MYSYSTEM) and used it to generate a new
kernel. Now, of course, the new disks show up on the console during
bootup. Here are the disk entries in the updated config file:
# grep disk E2MAIL
device disk re0 at xcr0 drive 0
device disk re1 at xcr0 drive 1
device disk re2 at xcr0 drive 2
device disk re3 at xcr0 drive 3
device disk re4 at xcr0 drive 4
device disk re5 at xcr0 drive 5
device disk fd0 at fdi0 drive 0
I'm going to do a full install of the os later to tailor it the way
we like it, but I wanted to learn a few things first. I would really
appreciate it if any of you could enlighten me about this, and I'll
certainly submit a SUMMARY. Thank you for your attention.
Paul Youngblood
University of Alabama in Huntsville
Received on Fri Jul 14 2000 - 21:08:09 NZST