Re: load source concurrent maintenance -- MIDRANGE-L

Um Joe, 'popping the drive and slipping in another' is not supported. :-)
You may very well end up with a requirement to do an IOA cache reclaim
which may (or may not) cause the system to flag the ASP as *EMPTY

However in that situation if you have successfully completed a couple of
SAVE 21s then I'd do just that. End the system to restricted condition.
Let it sit for 5 or 10 minutes to be sure nothing was left in the caches
and give it a go. Note that in this case the system likely wouldn't see
the new serial number of the drive since as far as it's concerned the
drive simply went silent and then came back. But I'd give it 60-40 that it
would work.

Does your disk cage have the plastic light pipes that show the LEDs on the
disk cage backplane? If it does you can concurrently maintain your system.

- L

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
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and System x V1
(616) 451-2500 System i IT Simplification: Linux
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If you can read this, thank a teacher....and since it's in English,
thank a soldier.

Joe Pluta <joepluta@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
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Re: load source concurrent maintenance

lbolhuis@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Joe,

You are not SOL if D01 dies, only if it Dies and then you power off

the

system before you replace it. D01 (like all the others) can be
concurrently replaced and rebuilt with no loss of data or uptime. The
'Gotcha' is that if D01 is dead and you power down you cannot IPL from
that drive because it's dead. Unless they've beefed up the logic in the

RAID cards significantly then you would be stuck with a System reload at

that point.

As a matter of practice we NEVER recommend powering down a system with

ANY failed drives no matter which one it is unless that's the Only way

replace the drive. (Many older systems in the bottom end 270 and

had this restriction.)

I do have the bottom end 270. So if it throws D01, I may well be out of
luck; that's a VERY nasty gotcha. My only hope will be to pop the
drive, stick a new one in, and tell it to rebuild. If it works, I'll be
in good shape. If not, I'm in for a complete reload and I'm not looking
forward to that.

Seems to me that maybe the old 270 was not the best choice for my
long-term production machine. But if I keep good backups and it does
throw D01 and I have to reload, I can always switch to mirroring before
I do the reload.

Joe