Extra HD

Time for external disk cabinet(s) on a SCSI chain. (Available from IBM or third parties.) You may want to bite the bullet and buy a RAID-5 cabinet with some room for growth.

Good luck.

After you physically install your drives, when you reboot your AIX system, or when your run cfgmgr, the system will automagically recognize the new drives and assign them physical device names. If they are IBM drives, it will know everything about them. If they are generic SCSI drives, it will recognize a drive, possibly with no details. (You can use smit to modify some device characteristics.)

lsdev -C lists all system devices.

Use the smit program to:
1. create a new volume group containing the new drives.
2. Create logical volumes on the volume group. Mirroring is done by specifying number of copies = 2 (or more).
3. Create your filesystems on the logical volumes.

To look at things outside of smit (why?):
lsvg lists volume group information
lslv lists logical volume information
lsfs lists file system information
See the man pages for all the details.

While you CAN use the various command-line utilities, mkdev, mkvg, mkfs and so on, this is very prone-to-error. Use the smit utility - it will ask the right questions and let you fill in the answers.

Good luck.

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