gmirror challenge

[Jason Morgan]

On Mon, Jan 21, 2008 at 03:41:16PM -0800, Jeff Pflueger wrote:
> I have a server and am using gmirror to mirror two disks.
> 
> The intent was to double my security...but my experience has been that
> it has generally doubled the amount of time that the server goes down!
> 
> gm0s1 is the name of the mirror. The mirror is Freebsd's boot source.
> ad4s1 is one provider
> ad6s1 is another provider
> 
> problems arose after a power outage.
> gmirror would work furiously at rebuilding ad4s1 to no avail and
> eventually I'd get an error like "GMIRROR provider gm0s1 destroyed" and
> the server would go down. I could reboot and do a little from within the
> system before this would happen again.
> 
> So I booted FreeBSD from disk, went into FixIt mode from sysinstall,
> then selected the cd/dvd option and then:
> chroot /dist
> mount_devfs devfs /dev
> kldload geom_mirror
> 
> and then gmirror clear ad4s1
> (no problem, that worked) - but, unfortunately I am unable to boot off
> of ad4 when ad6 has its SATA cable unplugged - I think that the drive is
> hosed/corrupted.
> 
> but, here's another problem:
> gmirror clear ad6s1 gives me this error:
> "Can't clear metadata on ad6s1: Invalid argument. Not fully done."
> 
> So without the metadata cleared on ad6s1, I can't boot from it
> and I can't boot from ad4s1 because I suspect that it is hosed...
> 
> anybody have any suggestions on how to clear the metadata of ad6s1 so I
> can boot from it without it going into gmirror and being unhappy?
> 
> Thanks for any help!
> 
> Jeff

Hey Jeff,

Try:

gmirror forget ad6s1

>From gmirror(8):

remove      Remove the given component(s) from the mirror and clear meta-
            data on it.

and futher on:

One disk failed.  Replace it with a brand new one:

           gmirror forget data
           gmirror insert data da1


I had a drive do something similar --- the system wouldn't crash, but
a drive just refused to be rebuilt. I used `forget' and it worked like
a charm.

~Jason


> 
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