Following up to my own post...
It seems that things are working now, at least for three of the seven drives. Sure, nobody in the history of mankind will ever likely recreate this dubious feat, but for posterity:
1. Pulled seven ST15150N drives from the Auspex carriers and mounted 'em in the StorageWorks SBB's.
2. Removed all jumpers. Set SCSI ID jumpers by hand. (With a trip to Radio Snack and a soldering iron, I could probably have hacked up a set of jumpers so that I'd have auto-ID selection and the Pretty Blinky Lights, but for now I'll leave that as a future enhancement opportunity.)
3. Attached the shelf to the filer. It recognized all seven drives and informed me they needed new firmware. Updated the firmware successfully with "disk_fw_update".
4. Attempted to "vol create test -d <etc>" at which point the filer (5.3.7R3) promptly blew chunks. Upon reboot, the machine displayed all sorts of unpleasant and unfamiliar messages, at which point I was fearing that perhaps the firmware update had not in fact been successful and I was in for a long night of ripping open the SBBs and mounting another seven victims. Er, drives.
5. Instead, attached the shelf to my trusty old 4/670MP, which also whined about 'em not being recognized. But after tracking down a reasonable-looking format.dat entry, I successfully formatted and verified three of the seven drives. At around 1 hour and 45 minutes _per drive_, during which time I ran out of beer and patience, I shut everything down and stuck the shelf back on the filer.
6. All three freshly and painstakingly reformatted drives showed up. Created a test volume. Success! Boot blocks updated! Yee haw, they work! Now, to repeat step 5 for the other four drives, after a beer run to restock.
Hee hee, and at 1:00, disk scrubbing kicked in. Neat. Everything looks just peachy so far...
So, after poking around with little or no success with some of the dangerous commands (and bouncing the box a couple of times :-) I'm still curious if there was a better/easier/faster way to have the filer force a reformat directly, but at this point i'm just going to bang on the drives for a while, do some reboots, see how they hold up. Then I'll fix up the four drives and boost my filer up to juuust about twice the capacity of my son's iBook! Hee hee. But my rack and UPS have arrived, so once the rest of the 15150's are formatted up, I'll actually put the filer into "production" as the boondoggle.com NFS server. Are there enough of us out there yet to start the "toasters-at-home" mailing list? :-)
And now that I've swiped the drives from that old Auspex, anyone want to roll it out back for some target practice? :-)
-- Chris
(Oh, and if you're wondering WHY I have an Auspex in my basement, the answer is "Because it was there." I'm a dedicated NetApp fan, but hey, free stuff is free stuff. :-) That thing is one massive, ugly hunk of metal compared to my sweet little '330.)
-- Chris Lamb, Unix Guy MeasureCast, Inc. 503-241-1469 x247 skeezics@measurecast.com