Large Systems

On a large system such as a T500 with a very large number of disk drives (such as 50 or more), you may see messages such as the following, during the system analysis phase of cold install.

Out of inode- can't link or find disk
or
Write failed, file system is full.
or
File system full.

To reduce the likelihood of this problem occurring, before you do the installation you should turn off any disks you don't plan to use for the installation process and start over.

After the system is cold-installed, you may wish to add back all the file systems that existed under the previous installation, either manually or using SAM. However, for a large number of file systems (for example, over a hundred), some tables in the kernel may be too small to allow correct booting. This is because the newly-installed kernel contains default values for kernel tables sizes, and does not allow for special configurations made to the kernel installed previously.

For example, the first boot after adding the file systems may result in error messages displayed to the console, such as the following:

inode:  table is full
proc:  table is full
file: table is full

Additionally, the boot may fail in various ways. For example, you may be have to do file system repair manually.

You should determine the correct configuration for your system.

Note that this problem does not appear to affect the Upgrade process (updating from HP-UX 9.0x), since during Upgrade, the new kernel parameters are derived from the previous kernel.