Originally posted by: TerryP

I did what I thought should be a pretty safe thing to do today, and Bad Things Happened. Maybe  you can help.

I"m running AIX 71 on a p6 box. I got a new EMC Clarion driver set from EMC, one package for the disks and one for the MPIO stuff. I had version 6.0.0.5 installed, and I did a smit update_all and updated to 6.0.0.7. To be safe, I selected "don't commit software" and "save replaced files" in SMIT. The I rebooted and expected to see all my EMC LUNs. Here's what happened:

1 After the boot, I didn't see ANY EMC LUNs, just the two internal disks. I ran cfgmgr, hoping that somehow they'd show up. Cfgmgr complained about "error inserting module into kernel" or something. Sorry, I didn't capture the exact text. And no disks showd up.

2. I rebooted again, hoping it would magically work. It didn't

3. I thought, okay, I'll rollback to the older version. I got into SMIT and tried to "reject installed software". It said "I don't see any software in the applied state". QUESTION: What did I do wrong? I asked for "no commit" in the smit update_all. Does that option not apply to kernel drivers?

4. I rebooted again, and this time my LUNs showed up! Subsequent looking showed that half my paths were "Missing". One HBA could see the LUNs, and the other couldn't. QUESTION: Any idea why it took multiple boots to make them show up, and then only half of the paths were good?

QUESTION: I started to just run cfgmgr and see if the paths would all show 'enabled', but then I got too scared to touch anything. Can cfgmgr how HURT ANYTHING? Is it (almost) completely safe to run cfgmgr?

I know I left out a lot of details, but I'm looking for general answers, mostly, so perhaps you can help anyhow.