[rescue] Drive Replacement Question

[Brian Deloria]

I was mistaken when I originally said that the metadb's are only on the root
devices.  The guy that set this up put one on each drive.  2x36 and 2x300
drives.  The drive wasn't marked for maintenance however it was complaining
about needing to be replaced in dmesg.  I did a metadetach to the
submirrors, cleared the metadb state information from the drive.  I then
tried using using cfgadm replace_device.  It bitched a whole lot about the
drive erroring and wanted me to remove the other submirrors (good) from the
mirror.  I just laughed halted the machine powered it off and replaced the
drive.

Booted it back up dumpted the vtoc from the good drive to the new drive,
added the metadb information to it, then I tried using metareplace and
metattach to put the submirrors back on to the mirror.  It bitched that the
device was not found.  ran drvconfig, devlinks, disks tried it again no
dice.  Went back to the man pages and the walk throughs on sun's site found
no mention of metadevadm.  Eventually found it with gooogle updated the
metadevice information on the drive and the mirrors attached just fine.

It seems that I could have more easily just halted the machine pulled the
disk put the new one in there and ran metareplace and been fine although I
suspect I would have had to run metadevadm and then metareplace.  Anyone
want to comment on this being easier / more dangerous?

Thanks again,

Brian



On 9/6/07, Phil Stracchino <phil.stracchino at speakeasy.net> wrote:
>
> N. Miller wrote:
> > I'd suggest removing the metadbs on the failing disk, replace it, and
> > rebuild the mirror.
> >
> > Also, note that while the docs for SVM say 2 metadbs, you really
> > should have at least 3, and preferrably more, spread out across disks
> > and controllers.  With only 2, if one disk fails and you only have 1
> > metadb, you have to play the "we don't have a quorum game", which is
> > a pain in the butt.
>
> Personally, I like to have two metadb copies on the boot disk, and one
> copy on each physical volume in the array.
>
>
> --
>        Phil Stracchino                CDK#2
> Renaissance Man, Unix ronin, Perl hacker, Free Stater
> phil.stracchino at speakeasy.net   alaric at caerllewys.net
> Landline: 603-429-0220           Mobile: 603-320-5438
>        It's not the years, it's the mileage.
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