Vinum Subdisk Crashed - How To Repair? -- SOLVED!!!

[Drew Tomlinson]

On 4/1/2004 12:15 PM Drew Tomlinson wrote:

> --- Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
>
>>> On Friday, 26 March 2004 at 21:53:44 -0800, Drew
>>> Tomlinson wrote:
>>
>>
>>>> > Please excuse whatever format in which this email
>>>> > arrives. My system is unusable so I am posting
>>>> > from Yahoo!.
>>>
>
> Thank you very much for your reply. I’ve tried to
> clean this up so it remains readable when it reaches
> you.
>
>>> Heh. I suppose that's a good enough reason.
>>
>>>> > I have a 4.9-RELEASE-p4 system. I have not made
>>>> > any changes to any source code. I have 3 vinum
>>>> > volumes configured. While attempting to diagnose
>>>> > problems with one of the volumes that uses a
>>>> > firewire drive, my system crashed with a trap
>>>> > 12 error. I have my /usr configured as a > striped vinum volume 
>>>> with one plex and two > subdisks. Upon reboot, the usr volume has one
>>>> > subdisk in a
>>>> > crashed state. Thus I can't mount /usr and > can't get my system 
>>>> up and running.
>>>> >
>>>> > I *REALLY* don't want to lose my data on /usr
>>>> > as I don't have a backup. It was my backup
>>>> > volume problems I was looking at when my
>>>> > trouble started. I have looked at
>>>> > http://www.vinumvm.org/vinum/how-to-debug.html. I
>>>> > have a copy of my config files and the page
>>>> > says one can use those to recreate his
>>>> > config without losing data as it does not write to
>>>> > the subdisks. Is this what I should do?
>>>
>>>
>>> Maybe.
>>
Not knowing what else to do, I totally removed everything related to my 
usr volume. Explicitly, I removed all subdisks, plexes, volumes, and 
drives, using the -f option when needed. Then I recreated the drives, 
volumes, plexes, and subdisks using my original configuration file. I 
was then able to fsck the volume and subsequently mount it.

After this success, I repeated the steps on my ftp volume. One final 
reboot and the system came up and all my data appears to be there on 
both my usr and ftp volumes.

<snip>

Based upon this experience with vinum and a similar one I had last year 
around this time, I strongly suggest that one does not use vinum with 
firewire drives. I have one 80 GB IDE drive that is in a firewire 
enclosure. Upon reboot, the drive is not recognized by the system. Then 
when vinum tries to access it, vinum responds unpredictably because it's 
not there. Sometimes only the volume containing the missing disk is 
affected but other times, some or all vinum volumes are affected.

I plan on writing up my experience with firewire to see if I'm doing 
something wrong or if there is some bug in the firewire driver in a new 
thread.

Hopefully this post will prevent someone else from having the problems 
I've had.

Drew