Re: Getting ready to add dasd

Joe has this right. The biggest things are that no matter if Green or GUI
you do these things in this order:

1) Add the drive to the system. ONLY do that when the blinking light says
so or you COULD cause errors on the bus. Like Joe says, slip it in 75% of
the way with the lever fully extended so it's ready. Don't panic though
because you get nearly a minute of 'blinky light time' to get it in there.
Do pay attention to the neighboring disks as in some drawers they go in
Lever down and other drawers they go in Lever up. (This is why the
stickers on the handle have the FC # printed upside down and downside up.)


2) If the drive is Used then Initialize and Format first. This proves the
thing will write data end to end and if it fails during this it's not
affecting any other disks or your data. You can then replace it before it
does!

3) Include the drive in RAID protection. If you just formatted it in 2)
above this will be *reallywayfast.

4) Add AND BALANCE the disk to the ASP. Remember the AND BALANCE. As Joe
says always do AND BALANCE unless it's a brand new system. Failure to do
so can (and likely will) cause all new data to be written to this new disk
causing it to go 'hot'. Hot in this case means 'extremely busy'
potentially causing an I/O bottleneck that slows your system down. Once
that happens it's hard to fix because a simple balance at that point won't
move the data off it. When you do AND BALANCE the system flags the new
disk for End Allocation (you can see this with CHKASPBAL and then review
your joblog). Until all disks in the ASP are balanced no NEW data goes to
this disk unit.

- Larry

Larry Bolhuis IBM Certified Advanced Technical Expert -
System i Solutions
Vice President IBM Certified Systems Expert:
Arbor Solutions, Inc. System i Technical Design and
Implementation V5R4
1345 Monroe NW Suite 259 eServer i5 iSeries LPAR Technical
Solutions, V5R3
Grand Rapids, MI 49505 IBM Certified Specialist
System i Integration with BladeCenter
and System x V1
(616) 451-2500 System i IT Simplification: Linux
Technical V5R4
(616) 451-2571 - Fax iSeries System Administrator for OS/400
V5R3
(616) 260-4746 - Cell


If you can read this, thank a teacher....and since it's in English,
thank a soldier.





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Subject
Re: Getting ready to add dasd






I've added disk to 520's during business hours all the time. Heck there's

even a graphical step-by-step how to do that in iNav.
iNav
My Connections
pick system
Configuration and Service
Hardware
Disk Units
Right click on By Location and select Graphical view.
Turn on "Show all frames/units"
Right click on an empty slot and select Install Disk Unit.

The trick is to shove the disk unit into the slot, but only half way! When

you do the Install Disk Unit you can see a light on that slot flashing.
That's when you finish shoving it in the rest of the way.
You can do this via 5250 also. However that requires you to know a bunch
of stuff like slots and bays and crud. Larry and that genre probably do
that on a weekly basis and can do that in their sleep. I've done it - I
prefer the graphical.
Then there's the usual adding to raid set. And then adding to ASP and
BALANCE THE DATA. I never select the option to just add to asp. Ok,
never is a strong word. I only do that if I am starting out a completely
new system and haven't loaded any user data yet.

Rob Berendt