Hard Disk Not Seen In format After Physical Replacement

Asset ID:	1-72-2027630.1
Update Date:	2018-03-05
Keywords:

Solution Type Problem Resolution Sure

Solution 2027630.1 : Hard Disk Not Seen In format After Physical Replacement

Applies to:

Solaris SPARC Operating System - Version 10 3/05 and later
Sun SPARC Enterprise M3000 Server - Version All Versions and later
Sun SPARC Enterprise M4000 Server - Version All Versions and later
Sun SPARC Enterprise M5000 Server - Version All Versions and later
Sun SPARC Enterprise M8000 Server - Version All Versions and later
Information in this document applies to any platform.

Symptoms

After the successful online replacement of a Hard Disk Drive it might happen that the new disk is not visible in the output of the format command,
although both the old and the new disk were correctly unconfigured/configured with cfgadm

cfgadm will see the disk without any problem.

Example for a M4000 disk:

# cfgadm -al|grep c0::dsk/c0t0d0
c0::dsk/c0t0d0 disk connected configured unknown

But the disk is not visible in format, hence the following command generates no output

# echo ""|format|grep -i c0t0d0
#

This issue has been observed with Solaris 10 and 11.

Cause

The operating system is not correctly aware of the new disk.

Solution

This issue has been resolved in multiple cases by restarting the devfsadmd deamon which avoids the need to reboot the operating system.
To achieve this, please restart the appropriate SMF service:

Solaris 10: svc:/system/device/local:default
Solaris 11: svc:/system/devfsadm:default

example Solaris 10:

# echo|format|grep -i c0t0d0
# svcadm restart svc:/system/device/local:default
# echo|format|grep -i c0t0d0
0. c0t0d0

example Solaris 11:

# echo|format|grep -i c0t0d0
# svcadm restart svc:/system/devfsadm:default
# echo|format|grep -i c0t0d0
0. c0t0d0

In the case that the steps shown above should not resolve the problem, please try the below solution.
Also these steps can be executed without a reboot of the operating system.

1.- Remove the Hard Disk Drive physically. In this example, the affected Disk is c0t0d0.

2.- Execute cfgadm command to unconfigure the Hard Disk Drive

#/usr/sbin/cfgadm -c unconfigure c0::dsk/c0t0d0

3.- Clean all links to the affected Hard Disk Drive

#/usr/sbin/devfsadm -C

4.- Verify that the Hard Disk Drive is not configured into the operating system

#/usr/sbin/cfgadm -al

c0::dsk/c0t0d0 <------ the entry for the corresponding disk should not exist in the output of the "cfgadm -al" command

5.- Check if there are still links that lead to the affected disk

# /usr/bin/ls -lL /dev/dsk/c0t0d0*
# /usr/bin/ls -lL /dev/c0t0d0*
# /usr/bin/ls -lAR /dev/device

6.- If there still exist links to the disk, they need to be removed

7.- Insert the new Hard Disk Drive into its physical slot

8.- Configure the new Hard Disk Drive

# /usr/sbin/cfgadm -c configure c0::dsk/c0t0d0

9.- Execute the devfasm command to attach any new device

# /usr/sbin/devfsadm

10.- Verify with cfgadm command the new device

# /usr/sbin/cfgadm -al |grep c0t0d0

c0::dsk/c0t0d0 <------ the entry for the corresponding disk should now exist again in the output of the "cfgadm -al" command

11.- Execute format command to verify the new Hard Disk Drive

# echo|format|grep -i c0t0d0
0. c0t0d0

If these steps still should not resolve the problem, please open a Service Request in the My Oracle Support Portal
and attach the output of the Explorer Data Collector to the new SR.

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