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From: system@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca (System Admin (Mike Peterson))
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apollo
Subject: Re:  Stripe Disk on DN10000
Message-ID: <1990Sep21.173447.14274@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca>
Date: 21 Sep 90 17:34:47 GMT
References: <9009201311.AA25490@richter.mit.edu>
Organization: University of Toronto Chemistry Department
Lines: 75

In article <9009201311.AA25490@richter.mit.edu> krowitz@RICHTER.MIT.EDU (David Krowitz) writes:
>My understanding of "invol" (and I will admit up front, that I have not made a 
>multidisk volume) is that option 1 initializes the disk (or disks) as a single
>logical volume, and that you only need to use option 2 if you wish to split the
>disk (or disks of a multiple disk volume) into more than one logical volume.
>Option 8 is always needed to create a OS paging file on a disk that you wish
>to boot the system from. The "n" modifier to options 1, 2, and 3 (non-bootable
>volume) only means that there will not be a "sys" and "sys/node_data" and a boot
>block(s) put onto the logical volume.

It is absolutely essential that you do an option '2' after building a
striped set with option '1', otherwise you will not have formatted
either disk. On our previous system, the disk block headers had to
contain the proper information, which was only written at format time -
does anyone know if the Apollo controllers require this information be
generated across a striped set (i.e. can you format separately then
stripe and expect it to work - my guess would be no, but ...)?

On our system we have 4 760 MB disks on 2 controllers, and they are
striped across controllers (w0:0 with w1:0, and w0:1 with w1:1). Here
are the invol commands to do the striping and formatting. I strongly
recommend that full write/read verification be done to try to find all
the bad spots that can be found with invol. Note that we make each
striped disk just one (very large) partition since we want maximum
flexibility of user and temporary files (some programs create
500 MB temporary files).

For the DN10000 system disk pair, the sequence is:

ex invol
   1 -m            build a striped group
   w0:0            select controller 0, disk 0
   2               select the number of disks to be striped
   1               type of striping to be done (sector)
   u0              physical volume name (doesn't really matter)
   w1:0            select controller 1, disk 0 as the second disk
   y               there is more to do
   2 -b            initialize logical volume
   w0:0            select controller 0, disk 0
   3               select full write and read verification
   8               use 8 K average file size
   all             make each physical disk a logical disk volume
   y               use the prerecorded badspot data
   y               there is more to do
   8
   w0:0            select controller 0, disk 0
   1               select logical volume 1
   4096            enter the page file size (4096)
   n               there is no more to do
ex calendar
   w               select Winchester disk
   ...             enter the proper date and time answering the prompts


For the DN10000 user disk pair, the sequence is:

ex invol
   1 -m            build a striped group
   w0:1            select controller 0, disk 1
   2               select the number of disks to be striped
   1               type of striping to be done (sector)
   u1              physical volume name (doesn't really matter)
   w1:1            select controller 1, disk 1 as the second disk
   y               there is more to do
   2 -b            initialize logical volume
   w0:1            select controller 0, disk 1
   3               select full write and read verification
   8               use 8 K average file size
   all             make each physical disk a logical disk volume
   y               use the prerecorded badspot data
   n               there is no more to do
-- 
Mike Peterson, System Administrator, U/Toronto Department of Chemistry
E-mail: system@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca
Tel: (416) 978-7094                  Fax: (416) 978-8775