Replacing a failed Vinum drive

Replacing a failed Vinum drive Replacing a failed Vinum drive
Last updated: 27 February 2000

The current man page is vague about replacing a failed drive. Here's a temporary overview:

Replace the physical drive.

Partition the new drive. Some restrictions apply:
- If you have hot-plugged the drive, it must have the same ID, the Vinum drive must be on the same partition, and it must have the same size.
- If you have had to stop the system to replace the drive, the old drive will not be associated with a device name, and you can put it anywhere. Create a Vinum partition which is as least large enough to take all the subdisks in their original positions on the drive. Vinum currently will not compact free space when replacing a drive. An easy way to ensure this is to make the new drive at least as large as the old drive.
  If you want to have this freedom with a hot-pluggable drive, you must stop Vinum and restart it.

If you have restarted Vinum, create a new drive. For example, if drive data3 is on the physical partition /dev/da3h, create a configuration file, say configfile, with the single line

drive data3 device /dev/da3h

Then enter:

# vinum create configfile

Start the plexes which were down. For example, vinum list might show:

vinum -> l -r test
V test                  State: up       Plexes:       2 Size:         30 MB
P test.p0             C State: up       Subdisks:     1 Size:         30 MB
P test.p1             C State: faulty   Subdisks:     1 Size:         30 MB
S test.p0.s0            State: up       PO:        0  B Size:         30 MB
S test.p1.s0            State: obsolete PO:        0  B Size:         30 MB

vinum -> start test.p1.s0
Reviving test.p1.s0 in the background
vinum -> vinum[295]: reviving test.p1.s0
(some time later)
vinum[295]: test.p1.s0 is up

Note that currently a bug will cause the state to be incorrect. Instead of being obsolete, the subdisks are reborn, and you can't start them like that. Instead, write:

vinum -> l -r test
V test                  State: up       Plexes:       2 Size:         30 MB
P test.p0             C State: up       Subdisks:     1 Size:         30 MB
P test.p1             C State: flaky    Subdisks:     1 Size:         30 MB
S test.p0.s0            State: up       PO:        0  B Size:         30 MB
S test.p1.s0            State: reborn   PO:        0  B Size:         30 MB

vinum -> start test.p1.s0
Can't start test.p1.s0: Device busy (16)
vinum -> setstate obsolete test.p1.s0
vinum -> start test.p1.s0
Reviving test.p1.s0 in the background
vinum -> vinum[295]: reviving test.p1.s0
vinum[295]: test.p1.s0 is up