gpart failing with no such geom after gpt corruption

[Robert Noland]

Olivier Smedts wrote:
> 2010/4/1 Bartosz Stec <bartosz.stec at it4pro.pl>:
>> Hello ZFS and GPT hackers :)
>>
>> I'm sending this message to both freebsd-current and freebsd-fs because it
>> doesn't seems to be a CURRENT-specific issue.
>>
>> Yesterday I tried to migrate my mixed UFS/RAIDZ config to clean RAIDZ with
>> GPT boot. I've following mostly this guide:
>> http://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS/GPTZFSBoot/RAIDZ1
>> I'm using CURRENT on 3x40GB HDDs (ad0-ad3) and additional 250GB HDD has been
>> used for data migration (ad4).
>>
>> Data was copied form RAIDZ to 250GB HDD, GPT sheme was created on  40GB
>> HDDs, then new zpool on them, and finally data went back to RAIDZ. Booting
>> from RAIDZ was succesful, so far so good.
>>
>> After a while I've  noticed some SMART errors on ad1, so I've booted machine
>> with seatools for dos and made long test. One bad sector was found and
>> reallocated, nothing to worry about.
>> As I was in seatools already, I've decided to adjust LBA size on that disk
>> (seatools can do that), because it was about 30MB larger than the other two,
>> and because of that I had to adjust size of freebsd-zfs partition on that
>> disk to match exact size of others (otherwise 'zpool create' will complain).
>> So LBA was adjusted and system rebooted.
> 
> I don't understand why you adjusted LBA. You're using GPT partitions,
> so, couldn't you just make the zfs partition the same size on all
> disks by adjusting it to the smallest disk, and let free space at the
> end of the bigger ones ?

For that matter, my understanding is that ZFS just doesn't care.  If you 
have disks of different sized in a raidz, the pool size will be limited 
by the size of the smallest device.  If those devices are replaced with 
larger ones, then the pool just grows to take advantage of the 
additional available space.

robert.

> Cheers,
> Olivier
> 
>> Yes, I was aware that changing disk size probably end with corrupted GPT and
>> data loss, but it doesn't seem to be a big deal for me as far as 2/3 of
>> zpool is alive, because I can always recreate gpt and resilver ad1.
>>
>> Unfortunately it wasn't so easy. First of all system booted, and as I
>> expected kernel message shows GPT error on ad1. Zpool was degraded but alive
>> and kicking. However, when I tried to execute any gpart command on ad1, it
>> return:
>>
>>   ad1: no such geom
>>
>> ad1 was present under /dev, and it could be accessed by sysinstall/fdisk,
>> but no with gpart. I've created bsd slice with sysinstall on ad1 and
>> rebooted, with hope that after reboot I could acces ad1 with gpart and
>> recreate GPT scheme. Another surprise - system didn't boot at all, rebooting
>> after couple of seconds in loader (changing boot device didn't make a
>> difference).
>>
>> Only way I could boot system at this moment was connecting 250GB HDD which
>> fortunately still had data from zpool migration and boot from it. Another
>> surprise - kernel was still complaining about GPT corruption on ad1. I had
>> no other ideas so I ran
>>
>>   dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad1 bs=512 count=512
>>
>> to clear beginning of the hdd. After that disk was still unaccesible fromt
>> gpart, so I tried sysinstall/fdisk againt to create standard BSD
>> partitioning scheme and rebooted system.
>> After that finally gpart started to talk with ad1 and GPT scheme and zpool
>> has been recreated and work as it supposed to.
>>
>> Still, how can we clear broken GPT data after it got corrupted?
>> Why gpart has been showing "ad1: no such geom", and how can we deal with
>> this problem?
>> Finally, why gptzfsboot failed with GPT corrupted on other disk after trying
>> to fix it, while it booted at first place?
>>
>> Or maybe changing LBA size of already partitioned HDD is extreme case, and
>> the only way these problems could be triggered ;)?
>>
>> Cheers!
>>
>> --
>> Bartosz Stec
>>
>>
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> 
> 
>