Rebuilding a HMC

UNIX AIX
1

Hi Guru's,

I'm trying to rebuild a very old HMC 7315-C02 the hard disk has gone so needs replacing. I've managed to find an old IDE hard disk lying around but its obvious that it's had windows running on it as the HMC install disks won't recognise the format. I'm trying to install HMC V6 R1.2 and don't get an option to format the hard disk before installing. Been thinking about installing a version of CentOS on the HMC just to format the disk, but would this work? Anybody got any bright ideas on how I can get out of this hole? Oh and the customer has done no sort of HMC backup ever on this box.

2

Many Unix/Linux distros won't overwrite hard disk partitions from other O/S's especially if there is no free space left on the drive.

Basically, you need to blow the existing partition table away. I don't know any HMC 7315 utility that will do that (others on this forum may well do) but you could simply put the drive in a generic PC and either run a wipe utility (eg, killdisk, a free download) or a Windows install routine.

A wipe utility can be used to write all zeros to every sector of the drive.

Or, for example, boot from a WinXP CD and when the opportunity comes, delete any partition(s) present and switch off the system immediately afterwards. Do NOT create a partition to install XP onto.

Hope that helps.

3

Wouldn't "fdisk" do exactly that? I am not a Linux specialist but i wonder if it isn't included in every distribution.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

4

@bakunin....Yes, you would think so wouldn't you. I agree with you but one must assume that this distro install routine calls its own fdisk utility and the OP is saying that it doesn't work. I have seen distros before which refuse to change partition tables from Windows and other non-Unix/non-Linux O/S's.

Ironically, when all us sysadmins spend all our lives trying to keep everything in order and uncorrupt, the OP here needs to completely nuke his partition table or, if not that, at least do enough 'damage' to make it unrecognisable as a Windows partition table. I just assumed that the fdisk of this distro was incapable.

Perhaps he could just 'dd' over the beginning of the drive but I don't know how to tell him to do that in AIX, not being an AIX expert. I assume he'd need a Live CD.