I have several HP Proliant DL380 server with the following configuration:

OS: CentOS 4.2
Kernel: 2.6.9-22.0.1.ELsmp
Disks: SCSI3, 72.5GB disks x 6 broken out into the following configuration:
Disks 0 and 1 -> Raid 1 Mirroring (72.5GB)
Disks 2,3,4,5 -> Raid 5 (210GB)

The O/S boots off of disk 0.

We just installed Emulex LP8000 Fibre Channel cards to these systems and have installed the latest drivers in the kernel as well as the latest firmware on the cards. The systems can see the LUNs being presented by the HP SAN but, on one of the systems udevd creates the device file /dev/sda and on another one it doesn't (identical configurations so far as I can tell). Also, on the device that has the /dev/sda device file fdisk cannot format the drive because it says that it can't read it.

This is the output from dmesg for the system that doesn't have the /dev/sda file:

Emulex LightPulse Fibre Channel SCSI driver 8.0.16.17
Copyright(c) 2003-2005 Emulex. All rights reserved.
ACPI: PCI interrupt 0000:06:01.0[A] -> GSI 74 (level, low) -> IRQ 225
lpfc 0000:06:01.0: 0:1303 Link Up Event x1 received Data: x1 x1 x0 x0
scsi0 : Emulex LightPulse LP8000 1 Gigabit PCI Fibre Channel Adapter on PCI bus
06 device 08 irq 225
scsi: unknown device type 12
Vendor: DEC Model: HSG80CCL Rev: V87F
Type: RAID ANSI SCSI revision: 02
scsi: unknown device type 12
Vendor: DEC Model: HSG80CCL Rev: V87F
Type: RAID ANSI SCSI revision: 02

For the system with the /dev/sda file I see the following:

[root@crsvm04 udev]# cat /proc/scsi/scsi
Attached devices:
Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
Vendor: DEC Model: HSG80CCL Rev: V87F
Type: RAID ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 01 Lun: 00
Vendor: DEC Model: HSG80CCL Rev: V87F
Type: RAID ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 01 Lun: 05
Vendor: DEC Model: HSG80 Rev: V87F
Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02

In dmesg it also complains about the device type 12 being unknown.

The SAN administrator is presenting the device as a WinNT drive. I suspect I may need to mount it as a NTFS partition. But why can't I reformat it? And why does one machine create the device file properly and the other one doesn't?

Any help will be greatly appreciated. You can e-mail me at idubrawsky@crs.loc.gov if need be.

Ido