OK, now you've added **another** level of complication, with the RAID card. Is your RAID card connected (there are two SCSI ribbon cables and a cable known as the AMI cable that plug into the motherboard---without these cables plugged in, the card is useful only for connecting an external RAID).
I do feel you are wrong about the Unix baseline for AIX. One **can** perform a Base Operating System with almost **no** Admin experience, even on an Apple ANS. It appeared to me, based on your previous posts, that you wanted to understand what was going on, rather than simply run the BOS installer.
If all you want is to run a simple BOS install, AIX is easier than A/UX (I have three IIfx boxes running 3.1.1 right now), any of the free Un*x O/Ss, and certainly Solaris or HP-UX, much less SGI or Unixware.
Pu the CD in the CD-ROM drive. Turn on the machine. Follow the step-by-step instructions as they appear. You are done. You will need configuration information, but if 15 years of Unix have not prepared you to enter an IP address or set up NFS, you are playing in the wrong sandbox.
If you would like to understand a bit more, here is a very rough accounting of one way you might approach employing three disks on AIX.
AIX employs a very powerful software abstraction layer between the user-level OS and the hardware. The heart of this abstraction layer is the Object Database. The Object Database is an RDBMS, and the manager for it is, as you might expect, the Object Database Manager, or ODM---when an AIX person uses "ODM", they are speaking very generally about both the Data Base itself, and the Manager for it; both are extensively employed. IBM used to give advanced courses just to learn the ODB and ODM---very useful if you want to add devices not recognized, or change a coded parameter that is not easily accessible (most changeable parameters are available to you when you "configure" a device using SMIT).
The ODM enables AIX to present physical hardware as data objects. Thus, if you run the SMIT command to show all devices, you will find a device for each DIMM (or SIMM for those of us with older machines), for the system planar, for the CPU, for your physical disks, your adapters (cards), and so on.
AIX creates a Physical Volume (a PV) for each hard disk drive in the system. The PV is not unique to a particular hard disk drive, but it does identify an individual drive at a specific physical address, comprising the Bus ID, and the SCSI ID, for each drive. There is a a key difference between a Physical Volume in the ODM and a specific, individual, hard disk drive installed in one of the several places a disk drive may be installed.
First, let's look at how AIX "sees" your three disks, in each of the three **most** likely configurations...
Thus, In your case, with three hard disk drives installed in drive trays 3,4,5, on a new and complete BOS install, AIX will create three Physical Volumes (PVs) for your disks, as follows: the first drive, in Tray 3, on Bus 0, with SCSI ID2 (PV 0,2); the second drive, in Tray 4, on Bus 0, with SCSI ID3 (PV 0,3), and the third drive, in Tray 5, on Bus 1, with SCSI ID4 (PV 1,4).
The above assumes that you have installed the three drives in order in the hot-swappable drive trays. As the trays **with** drive connect hardware are hard to come by, this may not be the case. This also assumes you connected the AMI leads in the tray, or that you set the IDs by hand---don't forget to terminate both buses manually, the ANS base documents, such as they are, often mislead the unwary into thinking the AMI software will configure SCSI IDs AND termination, but it only handles IDs. See Page 23 of the Setting Up... Apple Manual for the ANS.
If you have set up the three drives using the one drive that ships with the CD and the DAT, and then used the two rear drive bays (less hard to come by, but still no picnic), then the last two drives will have different PV IDs, as they have different SCSI IDs (this is more important to AIX than you might think).
The "top" rear drive is Bus 1, ID1, while the bottom drive is Bus 1 ID0; the ID for the "top" drive must be set by hand (well, "unset", anyway), and the bottom drive must be terminated. The PV IDs are now: Tray 3, on Bus 0, with SCSI ID2 (SAME, PV 0,2); the second drive, on "bottom", on Bus 1, with SCSI ID1 (PV 1,1), and the third drive, on "top", on Bus 1, with SCSI ID1 (PV 1,1).
If you pull the CD and the DAT and load all three drives in the first three drive trays, you get: the first drive, in Tray 1, on Bus 0, with SCSI ID0 (PV 0,0); the second drive, in Tray 2, on Bus 0, with SCSI ID1 (PV 0,1), and the third drive, in Tray 3, on Bus 0, with SCSI ID2 (PV 0,2).
NOW....no matter which of these hardware configurations you are using---or any others, for that matter---AIX creates three Physical Volumes (in order of our examples):
hdisk0---> 0,2 OR 0,2 OR 0,0
hdisk1---> 0,3 OR 1,0 OR 0,1
hdisk2---> 1,4 OR 1,1 OR 0,2
Why all this craziness, you may be wondering, when AIX is going to use the same three Physical Volume names no matter what? Well....the simplest answer is, what happens if you move a drive to a new ID---say you used the top three drive slots, and then you stumble on someone who sells you their old ANS with the CD and DAT, and you want to use those without having to stand on your head. You can move all your drives around---the HDDs would now go into the 3,4,5 slots, the CD in the 1 slot, and the DAT in 2---without having to reinstall your OS (I believe the term is "re-image" now).
Until you decide to do that, however, let me add a warning: AIX does not differentiate between like drives unless you enter an optional parameter. What this means, is that if you have three identical drives---say 3 IBM 4.51GB SCSI-2 F/W drives---AIX does not identify any single drive uniquely; you can swap around the three identical drives to different Bus or SCSI ID (the more common usage is Channel and ID) and AIX will create a new PV for that ID; thus you could wind up at hdisk9 if you cycled through all of the configs above (or at least hdisk7).
SO...I always select the optional parameter to assign each PV a unique identifer, and I write it down in my config log. This comes in handy if you have a snafu and forget which drive you installed what on five years later.
In any event...we now have three PVs, hdisk0, hdisk1, and hdisk2, ready to go. By default, AIX will install the BOS on hdisk0 ONLY. If you want to put all three drives together, you will need to select "Change Install Options" and then select "Drives" and then select the other two PVs (they will have a somewhat longer device ID, but the important parts are the last two pairs, which will be the Bus and ID for your drives---you will recognize them anyway, but it's useful to know if you wind up with a fifteen drive system, or ever want to configure a 31-drive SSA Array).
I do not know that this is really what you want to do---it is useful for many OSs not as sophisticated as AIX, but not so much so for AIX. You will be able to build filesystems on the other two drives---say for "usr/local" and for "usr/source" or whatever---after BOS install; you can also "mirror" one with another later if you want; I do not ever bother to "mirror" the disk(s) my BOS is on, as I have never seen it Save The Day---better bet is to make sysbacks (a bootable tape that you can easily restore from).
This is quite apart from a RAID---I do use a three-drive RAID5 for my BOS PV on my ANS 700/200, and it **has** Saved The Day (though only just).
Anyway, if you insist that you need all three drives to hold about 1G worth of stuff with plenty of room to grow...you'll want to add the other two drives (if this gives you problems, post, and I'll go step through it on one of my AIX boxes). This creates the assignment of PVs to Volume Groups.
A Volume Group is **something** like what a hard drive is on A/UX. On A/UX, a hard drive holds a set of disk partitions that are presented as "slices" under SVR2. In AIX, the PVs you group together are treated as a single "bucket" of space---AIX uses Logical Partitions and Physical Partitions---these are the same "size" for the ANS and any other modern machine (32-bit capable). From the space available in a Volume Group, AIX will create the equivalent of "partitions" on A/UX---these are called Logical Volumes. Do not carry this analogy very far at all; Logical Volumes are nothing like old-style "hard" or "soft" partitions, other than that they perform the same basic translation between the BOS and the physical media---but they do it far differently, with much greater freedom, flexibility, and a lot more power.
Logical Volumes are probably what you've actually been trying to figure out, but I wanted to try and give you some idea of how AIX goes about its work.
A Logical Volume is a "software hard disk", a means for AIX to view a selection of drive sectors (for A/UX, these must be on a particular disk, but on AIX a Logical Volume may span all, or just **parts** of, multiple disks). The ODM handles the presentation of "partitions"---collections of drive sectors on a collections disk drives, allocated as both Physical Partitions and Logical Partitions in case you are doing very sophisticated disk allocations for Data Bases or high-performance imagine servers---to the BOS as a Logical Volume.
AIX is installed on a default Volume Group called "rootvg"---the BOS installer creates the VG from the disks you select (or the default, lowest numbered PV) during installation set-up. The BOS installer creates a number of Logical Volumes that are standard to AIX, which are given rather unimaginative Logical Volume names, but which are what one expects to find on an AIX machine, so one gets used to them.
Remember that a Logical Volume IS NOT a filesystem, nor is it a mount point, though AIX employs both of those abstractions to present the contents of a Logical Volume to the higher-level OS and the user.
AIX creates as the default rootvg the following Logical Volumes (with their mount points following):
hd1----> "home" mount_point => /home
hd2----> "usr" mount_point => /usr
hd3----> "tmp" mount_point => /tmp
hd4----> "/" mount_point => /
hd5----> "boot" mount_point => NONE (not mountable)
hd6----> "paging" mount_point => NONE (not mountable)
--- (no hd7, in case you're wondering)
hd8----> "jfslog" mount_point => NONE (not mountable)
hd9var----> "var" mount_point => /var
AIX creates these LVs with just enough space to install the BOS and optional AIX software you selected during the install process. You will need to go into the System Management Interface Tool (SMIT) and allocate space as needed, or set the LVs up once as you think best (this is what I do, and why I would NOT allocate all three disks to the rootvg, so that I can create my fileserver and source code filesystems on their own LVs in their own VGs---this simplifies management, makes backing up easier, makes recovery much easier, and also minimizes fallout if things go south---again, a RAID is a different fish).
I have to go, but I can walk you through some of this in more detail, or help you allocate space once you've installed AIX and brought your AIX box on line.
A final caveat---the ANS is NOT a RS/6000; like nearly every brilliant idea Apple has ever had, it was set up to be an Apple-only project, and then abandoned after Apple blew its own foot off (in this case, by not aggressively marketing it, by not pushing an Apple-branded AppleShare server for AIX {one exists, btw}, or otherwise supporting the ANS).
Hope this Tome helped!
caryn
