Adding a second hard drive to a B-style Sun box

From Cassandra

question posed on the foxboro@freelists.org mailing list, August 2004

Question:

How to add a second hard drive to an AW51B box.
-- Brian Long, Green Bay Packaging, Arkansas Kraft Division

Answer:

It is pretty easy to add that second drive. First, however, you need to decide if it is to be a separate drive with its own independent file structure (as now you have /var, /usr and /opt), or if it is to be concatenated with the /opt file system.

Concatenation to the /opt system means that when you add this second drive, the /opt system would now include both the existing slice (partition) from the existing drive, plus all the space on this new drive. If you want the space to increase the amount of data your historian can store, this is a good way to go. If you want it for other storage, however, I would suggest against this form. You see, the complexity of backup and restore operations increases when you concatenate as both drives are now essentially in lock step. It becomes fairly easy to botch up both of them in backups and restore operations.

Also, if you want to concatenate, I am not going to describe it here. There is an administrator's manual which covers that operation better than an e-mail ever could.

OK. You want to add a drive and make it an independent file structure.

• First, mount the drive into one of those funky "Aroura disk caddies." That's the one you already know in the AW51B. The second drive goes into the same kind of structure.

• Shut down the AW, open it up, and slide the new drive in on top of the first one. Ensure the thing's plugged in tight and that swing over clamp is in place, then close up the box. Hardware component is completed.

• As the box powers up, interupt the boot sequence with the STOP/A keystroke.

• Restart the boot with the command "boot -r". This causes the hardware config to be scanned and the /dev directory of devices to be rebuilt.

Observe the system booting up. Once the system is booted, you will have an accessible drive 1 (the first drive is drive 3).

• Verify that the drive is there using the command 'format'.

• Set up one or more slices (partitions), also use the utility 'format'.

• Use 'newfs' to create a file system in each new slice.

• Use 'mkdir' to create a directory in the root for each of the slices on the new drive. This will be the point at which that slice is to be mounted.

• Use 'mount' to mount each slice in the new drive the first time.

• Edit the file '/etc/vfstab' to create an entry for each slice so that it is mounted on reboot of the system.

Each of these commands has a 'man' page. I can send a bit more info on each if you wish, but I didn't want this e-mail to get too big.

Good luck,

William C. Ricker
FeedForward, Inc.
wcricker@feedforward.com

added to The Cassandra Project Wiki by Duc M. Do, 19 August 2004