Undeletable ATA RAID

[Sean Hamilton]

Soeren Schmidt wrote:
| It seems Sean Hamilton wrote:
|| Soeren Schmidt wrote:
||| It seems Sean Hamilton wrote:
|||| [ Undeletable ATA RAID ]
|||
||| What kind of controller do you have since that is vital for how
||| ATA RAID's are setup ?
||
|| It's using software RAID on a Promise ATA100 controller.
|
| Hmm, with both disks connected, atacontrol delete whatever arrays it
| see there, then make a new array with atacontrol covering both disks,
| then delete that. That should make certain all array information si
| overwritten...

I can't, because the second disk is gone. (I probably should have deleted
the array before removing it...) I could add another disk, or whatever, but
this problem should probably be fixed.

Anyhow, sequence of events:

- Create SPAN array ar0 on ad4,ad6. (the only disks in the system)
- Install freebsd onto array.
- Get new disks, install as ad0 and ad1.
- Create stripe ar1 on ad0,ad1.
- Forgetting having done so, remove ad1.
- Boot, now ar0 and ar1 are reversed. ar0 is broken, ar1 works fine
  (but fstab is confused, of course.)

It can boot fine if I unplug ad0, so I'm guessing it looks at the first disk
for raid info? Hm, perhaps a better naming system is in order. I never liked
how it stores array info in the disk like this... seems trouble-prone...
like this.

...Ah, seems booting into single-user, deleting ar0, creating at0 as a
single-disk span array, and deleting that, has things working. Where does it
store the array info? Seems strange that zeroing the disk kept it, does it
just choose a disk and use that for all info? Or is it at the end of the
disk? I ^Cd the dd after a few seconds.

sh