vinum striped volume has corrupt plex, help needed (resolved)

[Lee Dilkie]

Final update on this chapter for all of you breathlessly waiting for word on
what happened... :)

turned out to be a couple of issues. The scsi cable seemed to be sensitive
to it's route through the innards of my case, a little more interference in
some spots perhaps. But the bigger issue was that the extra drive I added
taxed my power supply just a bit too much. When the 5 baracudda drives were
operational under vinum (and striping made them *all* active at once) the
resultant strain on the PS lead to signal errors on the scsi bus (fast and
wide but not differential). Powering off the new drive allowed me to restore
vinum (thanks for the "setstate", i needed it several times) and copy off
the data to a network share.

One think I noticed and I'm wondering if anyone else has seen this. When my
scsi drives were having difficulity, they would spin down to a lower speed.
Sometimes they would spin down to several lower speeds and even stop on
occasion before spinning back up. This was sometimes (but not always)
accompanied by a "bus free in data-in phase" error message on the console.
In severe cases there would be an entire scsi dump state on the console. Was
the scsi driver telling the drives to spin down or were the drives doing it
themselves? I've never seen that behaviour in other OSs. I'm wondering if
the drives (i couldn't figure out which one was changing speed) were
responding to PS voltage drops or something?

Another thing.... One forgets the march of technology. I remember coding
scsi drivers waay back when it was called sasi. Reverting my
fast-wide-disconnectenabled-synchronous drives back to
narrow-slow-nodisconnect and asynchronous (just like the original spec) made
them very slow. took forever to dd them. And of course my scsi drives are
slow by todays scsi standards...

anyway, thanks all.

-lee

>-----Original Message-----
>From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Lee Dilkie
>Sent: Sunday, May 09, 2004 9:50 AM
>To: 'Greg 'groggy' Lehey'
>Cc: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>Subject: RE: vinum striped volume has corrupt plex, help needed
>
>
>Update on my progress.
>
>The "setstate up" allows me to read my array now. I seem to have a read
>error on /dev/da1s1e about 262M from the start of the disk.
>(i'm using dd
>if=/dev/da*s1e to copy the contents of each drive to separate
>files, in case
>i screw something up and I need to restore a drive and re-try
>the vinum...
>don't know if that a dumb idea or not but it seemed logical).
>
>anyway, i have to figure out a way to get around this read
>error. or find
>out what file(s) it affects so i can avoid trying to copy
>them. Any pointers
>would be welcome (as I fire up google... where would we be
>without search
>engines?)
>
>>> When i tried to vinum start striped.p0.s1, most of the time
>>i would get an
>>> error "Input/output error (5)" but a couple of times the
>>command hung (as it
>>> is right now).
>>
>>It would be interesting to see the ps -l output for that process and
>>any other Vinum-related processes.
>
>Darn. I wish i had done that for you but I rebooted my server
>and vinum is
>running correctly now. When this is all finished, I'll see if I can get
>vinum stuck again and retrieve anything you wish.
>
>thanks for the help folks(greg), the saga continues.
>
>-lee
>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>>[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Greg 'groggy'
>>Lehey
>>Sent: Saturday, May 08, 2004 6:40 PM
>>To: Lee Dilkie
>>Cc: freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
>>Subject: Re: vinum striped volume has corrupt plex, help needed
>>
>>
>>On Saturday,  8 May 2004 at 13:37:42 -0400, Lee Dilkie wrote:
>>> Hi there,
>>>
>>> I've been running a 5 disk vinum array (sripted, no
>>redundancy) for a few
>>> months now. It's composed of 5 scsi drives of 4G each. I
>>bought a new 120G
>>> ide drive, with the intention of copying over all the files
>>from the vinum
>>> array and retiring the array (the scsi drives are really loud).
>>>
>>> All was fine until the file copy part. Shortly after
>>starting, i started to
>>> get scsi errors and the scsi system reset the drives and
>>re-spun them up in
>>> an attempt to provide data (this i could hear). Eventually
>>vinum reported a
>>> read error. My machine kinda locked up because there were
>>swap partitions on
>>> the scsi drives and things just went south when the OS couldn't swap
>>> properly.
>>>
>>> I rebooted and fsck'd my other partitions just fine but
>>vinum reported that
>>> the plex was corrupt and one of the subdisks was stale (see
>>"vinum list"
>>> output below). I also include the output from the command to
>>read and parse
>>> the vium table on each drive ( as describe at
>>> http://www.vinumvm.org/vinum/how-to-debug.html ). it sure
>>looks to me like
>>> all the disks have the same vinum info.
>>>
>>> When i tried to vinum start striped.p0.s1, most of the time
>>i would get an
>>> error "Input/output error (5)" but a couple of times the
>>command hung (as it
>>> is right now).
>>
>>It would be interesting to see the ps -l output for that process and
>>any other Vinum-related processes.
>>
>>> Also, I reconfured my scsi (2940uw) to the lowest transfer speed,
>>> disabled wide negotation (these are wide fast drives), disabled
>>> disconnect and disabled synchronous transfers. Basicly, i slowed
>>> them down as slow as they can go. I am able to successfully read
>>> each drive (tested the first 1G of each using "dd if=/dev/da*s1e
>>> of=/dev/null bs=1m count=1000").
>>
>>That might work for a while.
>>
>>> There were no write operations to the vinum volume when things
>>> crashed. I'm hoping i can get vinum up and running again so i can
>>> copy off this data.
>>
>>Vinum protects you by making it difficult to access data of dubious
>>integrity.
>>
>>> Question to the group. Would a vinum create using the original
>>> configuration (i have the file) recover this situation so i could
>>> mount and read the disk?
>>
>>Yes.
>>
>>> Is there something else to do that will help?
>>
>>Yes.  Do:
>>
>> vinum -> setstate up striped.p0.s1 striped.p0
>>
>>When you're happy with the data, do:
>>
>> vinum -> setdaemon 4
>> vinum -> saveconfig
>>
>>Greg
>>--
>>When replying to this message, please copy the original recipients.
>>If you don't, I may ignore the reply or reply to the original
>>recipients.
>>For more information, see http://www.lemis.com/questions.html
>>Note: I discard all HTML mail unseen.
>>Finger grog at FreeBSD.org for PGP public key.
>>See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
>>
>
>
>_______________________________________________
>freebsd-questions at freebsd.org mailing list
>http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions
>To unsubscribe, send any mail to
>"freebsd-questions-unsubscribe at freebsd.org"
>