problem with geli and LSI controller

[Marc UBM Bocklet]

On Sun, 19 Jul 2015 09:16:51 -0700
John-Mark Gurney <jmg at funkthat.com> wrote:

> Marc UBM via freebsd-stable wrote this message on Sun, Jul 19, 2015 at 17:34 +0200:
> > a few weeks ago our Highpoint Rocket Raid controller (hptrr) started
> > biting the dust (spurious channel resets). We bought a LSI 9201-16i
> > (mps) to replace it. Connected to the hptrr were 4 external e-sata
> > enclosures, configured in JBOD mode. Together with two disks connected
> > to the onboard SATA controller, this formed a geli encrypted raidz-2
> > zpool. 
> > Just now, I connected the disks to the mps controller. They show
> > up fine in dmesg. The problem is, when trying to attach the disks
> > formerly connected to the hptrr controller, geli is unable to find the
> > metadata on the disks and errors out with:
> > 
> > "geli: Cannot read metadata from /dev/da4: Invalid argument"
> > 
> > gpart show says "gpart: No such geom: da4"
> > 
> > Trying to restore the geli metadata gives:
> > "geli: Provider size mismatch: wrong backup file?"
> > 
> > Is it possible that the hptrr controller handled the disks in some
> > special way and it's only possible to read them there?
> 
> This sounds like the drives were in raid0 mode, and not raw disk
> mode...  You might be able to recover the disk w/ geli resize,
> assuming only space was added at the end, not at the begining, but
> I have never personally tried that myself...  I'd recommend trying
> on a copy of the drive so you don't loose data if that is possible..
> 
> You can also try to find the old geli label w/ a command like:
> dd if=<disk> bs=1m iseek=<location> count=5 | strings -n 9 -td
> 
> And get current disk size using diskinfo...
> 
> Something like:
> #diskinfo /dev/ada0
> /dev/ada0       512     3000592982016   5860533168      4096    0       5814021 16      63
> #dd if=/dev/ada0 iseek=$((3000592982016/1024/1024-1)) bs=1m 2>/dev/null | strings -n 6 -td | grep GEOM::
> 1530880 GEOM::ELI
> 1531392 GEOM::LABEL
> 
> You might have to go farther back than 1 MB...
> 
> Good luck...

Thanks a lot for the input - I'll be trying that as soon as possible
and will report back here!

Cheers,
Marc