kern/157293: [mfi] mfiutil/mfi does not allow adding a previously configured drive to be added to a new array

[Jonathan]

The following reply was made to PR kern/157293; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Jonathan <jonathan at kc8onw.net>
To: Garrett Cooper <yanegomi at gmail.com>
Cc: bug-followup at FreeBSD.org
Subject: Re: kern/157293: [mfi] mfiutil/mfi does not allow adding a previously
 configured drive to be added to a new array
Date: Fri, 09 Sep 2011 10:20:26 -0400

 On 9/9/2011 4:18 AM, Garrett Cooper wrote:
 > I wish I had seen this issue earlier so I could have sent a suggestion
 > (in all fairness this should have been a post to an email list, like
 > freebsd-scsi, freebsd-stable, or even freebsd-questions.
 
 Noted.
 
 > If you have a degraded stripe-only RAID, then you're basically SOL. That
 > aside.. if you didn't use a straight RAID-0, you could have readded the
 > new drive as a hot spare like so:
  > mfiutil add <drive-number> <volume>
  > and the controller would have added the drive to your RAID.
 
 The drive in question was the only member of it's RAID stripe because I 
 could not get the controller to do pass through on it when I first set 
 it up.  For some reason the drive was not properly recognized after a 
 power failure and in the process of trying to walk the data center 
 through bringing in back over the phone it was somehow removed from the 
 controllers stored configuration.  The drive itself still had the LSI 
 metadata on it somewhere that made the controller think it was still in 
 use elsewhere so it refused to let me create a new RAID or JBOD device 
 with it.  Would the "add" command have still worked in that case, it 
 seems unlikely?  The original drive turned out to be fine.  I got it 
 from the datacenter, put it in my home server, and imported the ZFS pool 
 without a problem and with all of it's data intact and it's still there now.
 
 It seems like there needs to be a way to either force a drive into an 
 mfi RAID or to somehow wipe the controller metadata without having to dd 
 /dev/zero to the drive.