clearing Vinum configurations

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Saturday, 11 October 2003 at 11:23:03 -0700, aarong wrote:
> I've been toying with Vinum extensively these past few weeks, on 4.8,
> and I've yet to come across a way to effectively and *completely* clear
> a Vinum configuration. After creating a configuration, Vinum stores the
> configuration on the drive or drives and resetconfig does not clear
> that written config. Case in point, after reinstalling FreeBSD on a
> primary drive, Vinum started up and read the previous installs
> configuration from the second drive which had not been formatted. On
> another install, I tried zeroing out the 265 Vinum sectors found 16
> sectors in on the primary drive, but was greeting with a "missing
> operating system" on reboot.

I'm going to need more information on this.  It doesn't correspond at
all with my experience.  Here's an example:

  vinum -> l
  7 drives:
  D mytest7               State: up       /dev/da6s4h     A: 3070/4094 MB (74%)
  D mytest6               State: up       /dev/da5s4h     A: 0/4094 MB (0%)
  D mytest5               State: up       /dev/da4s1h     A: 0/4094 MB (0%)
  D mytest4               State: up       /dev/da3s4h     A: 0/4094 MB (0%)
  D mytest3               State: up       /dev/da2s4h     A: 0/4094 MB (0%)
  D mytest2               State: up       /dev/da1s4h     A: 0/4094 MB (0%)
  D mytest1               State: up       /dev/da0s4h     A: 0/4094 MB (0%)
  
  ...
  
  vinum -> resetconfig
   WARNING!  This command will completely wipe out your vinum configuration.
   All data will be lost.  If you really want to do this, enter the text
  
   NO FUTURE
   Enter text -> NO FUTURE                                                                                                Vinum configuration obliterated
  vinum -> start
  ** no drives found: No such file or directory
  vinum -> l
  0 drives:
  0 volumes:
  0 plexes:
  0 subdisks:

> Two questions:
>
> 1) why doesn't resetnconfig clear all the configurations, 

As far as I know, it does.

> including the ones written to Vinum drives?

I'm not sure I understand.  Do you mean "and not just in memory"?
Yes, it does that.

> 2) why doesn't dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da0 seek=16 count=265 work?
> What's in those 265 sectors that I can't touch?

The second sector on the disk is protected.  You can't write to it.
If you start at sector 2, it will work.

The Vinum label is at sector 8.  That's the only sector you need to
clear to manually obliterate a Vinum configuration.

Greg
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