Listing the Disks on a System With hinv

Listing the Disks on a System With hinv

You can list the disks connected to a system by giving this hinv command from IRIX:

hinv -c disk

The output lists the disk controllers and disks present on a system, for example:

Integral SCSI controller 0: Version WD33C93B, revision D
Disk drive: unit 2 on SCSI controller 0
Disk drive: unit 1 on SCSI controller 0

This output shows a single integral SCSI controller whose number is 0 and two disk drives. These disks are at drive addresses 1 and 2. In hinv output, drive addresses are called units. They are also sometimes called unit numbers. Each disk is uniquely identified by the combination of its controller number and drive address.

If you are in the PROM Monitor, you can also give the hinv command from the Command Monitor:

>> hinv

Output for SCSI disks looks like this:

SCSI Disk: scsi(0)disk(1)
SCSI Disk: scsi(0)disk(2)

In this output, the controller number is the "scsi" number and the drive address is the "disk" number. The type of controller isn't listed. As a rule of thumb, workstations have integral controllers and servers may have integral SCSI controllers or non-integral controllers that are SCSI or VME. On some Challenge systems, the output of hinv in the PROM monitor shows only disks on the boot IOP (I/O processor).

The controller number and drive addresses of disks are specified, using a variety of syntax, as arguments to the IRIX disk and filesystem commands, such as fx, prtvtoc, dvhtool, and mkfs. For example, for a disk on controller 0 at drive address 1:

To specify the disk on an fx command line, the command line is:
fx "dksc(0,1)"

To specify the disk (actually, its volume header) on a prtvtoc command line, either of these two commands can be used:
prtvtoc /dev/rdsk/dks0d1vh
prtvtoc dks0d1vh
To specify the disk 1 (actually, its volume header) on a dvhtool command line, the command is:
dvhtool /dev/rdsk/dks0d1vh
To specify partition 7 of the second disk above on a mkfs command line for an EFS filesystem, the command is:
mkfs -t efs /dev/rdsk/dks0d1s7

Tip: You can use the Disk Manager in the System Toolchest to get information about the disks on a system. For instructions, see the section "Checking Disk Setup Information" in Chapter 6 of the Personal System Administration Guide.