Question : Problem: Format HDD without Navisphere

Hi All,

Recently I got an EMC Clariion FC4700 system with several HDD's in it. The system looks good and I was able to assing basic parameters to it like IP addresses for the SP's, RAID groups, etc. My only problem is that I don't have the management Laptop for the system which would contain the Navisphere Manager software and unfortunately I wasn't able to get a copy of the original Navisphere CD (if ever existed), so I can't access low level Clariion commands at this time.

Recently one of the hard disk drives was taken out and formatted directly under a Solaris host which cleared it out completely. Now when I put back the drive it is recognized by the Clariion box as Unformatted and I can't find a way to re-initialize it. While it's in an unformatted mode, I can't bind it to any RAID groups and therefore it is completely useless at this time.

If someone knows a way how to format a Clariion HDD without Navisphere or knows where can I get a spare copy of the management software (please don't post messages about contacting EMC), please let me know as soon as possible.

Thanks & regards.

Answer : Problem: Format HDD without Navisphere

Well my friend... It is possible to revert back from the 512 sector format.

I confirm that yesterday I successfully did that under Solaris and now the HDD is not complaining anymore within the FC4700 about being unformatted. It's fully usable and is indicating the normally seen "unbound" status which was my goal in fact :).

So it seems that there are two important things to remember when dealing with HDD's and FC4700. First of all you should have EMC firmware for the HDD (not confirmed on 100% though) and secondly it must be formatted with 520 sectors geometry. Special note here is that you must fully format it - not just change the sector size. It looks to me that FC4700 is not capable of any "format" related activity.

I used the SCU utility under a sparc based Solaris machine and while it took some time to fully reformat the drive, I think the checksums and timestamps within the last 8 bytes after the 512-th sector were also compromised.

This is what I did under Solaris (you must download the SCU utility beforehand):

From the main shell type:

scu -f /dev/rdsk/c7t65d0s2

Then use the following set of command:

set bypass on
set device block-length 520
format

Note that I used the "s2" slice on the HDD all the time because it represents the whole HDD surface. I'm not a Solaris expert but I would say that people may easilly fall into the trap by pointing the drive onto any other slices and this may not bring the appropriate results. I didn't try this myself, but I thought it might be usefull to mention it. So once my HDD was fully reformatted, I just put it back into the FC4700 and it was recognized immediatelly as usable drive :)

Just for your information I used an old StorEdge A5200 and a Ultra-1 box with Solaris 9 for the temporary format operations. Also I managed to get into the "Engineering Mode" of the FC4700 box straight from within the integrated Navisphere but that wasn't much of a help.

So it's beer time now :)

Cheers