State of gvinum RELENG_5 or RELENG_5_4 ?!

[Peter Orlowski]

On Wed, May 11, 2005 at 11:42:02AM -0600, secmgr wrote:
> >
> >I had to erase the gmirror metadata on the intact disk to get it
> >to work again. 
> >
> What steps did you take to the gmirror the disk so you could get your 
> data back?

I took the physically intact disk and did a

gmirror clear /dev/ad4 .

Then I could fsck the filesystems on it and use it as plain
/dev/ad4, i.e. no longer as a mirrored disk. Probably I could
have started over with 

gmirror label m1 ad4

but I was reluctant to do that to a disk that had all the user data
on it. So I rather changed the fstab not to use the mirror any
more.

At some stage in that procedure I also lost the gmirror metadata 
on the gmirrored system disk. It's not clear to me how that
happened, but when I tried to boot the system after removing the 
physically broken SATA-disk, that is with only the "logically
broken" part of the data gmirror installed (before erasing the
gmirror metadata), it found only the
broken data gmirror (and did not want to use it), but the intact
gmirrored system disk had completely disappeared. That didn't
change when I tried to boot with the system disks alone. I had 
to boot a rescue system and tell fstab to use a plain disk as 
the system disk, too.


> 
> At this point, I'm thinking that as far as S/W RAID goes in FreeBSD, the 
> "R" is pretty meaningless

Well, "R" does not mean "redundant" but "realtime backup" ;-(.

Peter