Hi, I am a bit of a newbie to Unix so please be patient with me! We have a Sun Enterprise 450 Server running Solaris, and after having a PCI, SCSI card installed are now trying to connect a Standalone RAID device to it. We are having a problem with the 'format' command at the moment. When ever we type format the follwoing message appears:- "Searching for disks...Assertion failed: *dim2 >= *dim3, file auto_sense.c, Line 1619 Abort - core dumped"
Can any one explain this problem? Why can I not run the format utility?
Did you check the terminations on both end of the SCSI bus and insure that the devices not on the ends of the bus are not terminated? SCSI terminations problems and misconfigurations are the number one cause of system errors with SCSI disks.
In fact, I used to only use SCSI on my servers, but since EIDE performs 'good enough' and disk drives are now really big, I have converted all servers in my shop to EIDE just so I don't have any more SCSI failure errors. I've found that dirt, a loose connection, etc. on a SCSI termination can cause a SCSI bus error. I simply do not have the time to worry about SCSI termination errors.