Re: AS/400e 170 IPL failure

Well, that didn't go much further. I got "Disk unit check failed -
unable to IPL". Several times.

So, I did some poking around in the DST, looking at disk info. The
drive in frame 1 position 1 is part of what was parity set 1 (which I
stopped) and shows as operational and in ASP1, so I'd bet that's the
"load source" drive. It's ID'd as DD001

It seems to think that two drives are in frame 1 position 2 - the
missing drive (also part of ASP1, ID'd as DD003) and another drive
with a different serial number - which actually physically is in that
location.

So, we have two drives in ASP1 - the one I think is the load source
drive and the missing drive.

Then we have four drives that are not part of ASP1. They are ID'd as
DD005 (operational), DPH001 (not ready), DPH002 (Read/Write Protected)
- this is the one in frame 1 posn 2 and DPH003 (Read/Write Protected).

I'm guessing that they must be part of parity set 2, the one that it
warned me I'd lose data if I stopped parity for it.

I don't know whether this is useful data, but it's what I could collect.

On Fri, Sep 30, 2016 at 11:26 AM, Robert <robert626001@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

But possibly not zero after all. As I had nothing to lose, I stopped
Parity Set 1 and tried a B M IPL. It gave me a disk error warning (I
wrote down the details in case I might need them later) and allowed me
into DST - as QSECOFR, no less!

Display Disk Configuration Status told me that ASP1 was unprotected,
Disk Unit 1 was configured (the serial # matched one of the drives in
Parity Set 1) and Disk Unit 3 (not a s/n from PS1 was missing).

I reset the system password while I was in there and asked it to
IPL.It sat for a while, then put me back in DST, showing C600450A on
the control panel.

So, that's progress of a sort. I'm further along than I was before, at least.

Now, is there any way of retrieving the license keys from the DST, or
does it have to complete an IPL before it can see them?

--
Robert

On Thu, Sep 29, 2016 at 7:41 PM, DrFranken <midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

In this case minuscule is indeed approaching zero. :-(

With IBM i and it's predecessors RAID 1 is referred to as Mirroring. So
because he is seeing RAID sets it's RAID 5. (Recall RAID 6 showed up with
MUCH newer hardware than this old 170!) With Mirroring the drives on their
own appear unprotected but the ASP itself is flagged Mirrored. There will
also be two drives #1 and two #2 etc.

I honestly think the previous owner pulled a couple drives as spares or to
repair another machine and the system ASP is a gonner.

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.Frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com - Personal Development IBM i timeshare service.
www.iInTheCloud.com - Commercial IBM i Cloud Hosting.

On 9/29/2016 8:21 PM, Robert wrote:

You are, of course, correct. I was misremembering how RAID 5 worked.
Two dead drives and it's shot. Degraded has often panned out well for
me, but if this is RAID 5 it's beyond degraded.

The only faint hope that is left is that while I'm assuming that it's
using RAID5, I don't know how to verify that. So there's a miniscule
chance that it's using mirroring (or RAID 1) instead. Said chance is
likely vanishingly small, however.

The work with disks functionality is very limited, when you D IPL to
the DST, so I'm not sure how to look into that.

--
This is the Midrange Systems Technical Discussion (MIDRANGE-L) mailing list
To post a message email: MIDRANGE-L@xxxxxxxxxxxx
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change list options,
visit: http://lists.midrange.com/mailman/listinfo/midrange-l
or email: MIDRANGE-L-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Before posting, please take a moment to review the archives
at http://archive.midrange.com/midrange-l.

Please contact support@xxxxxxxxxxxx for any subscription related questions.