gmirror challenge

[Jason Morgan]

On Mon, Jan 21, 2008 at 05:35:46PM -0800, Jeff Pflueger wrote:
> 
> > Hey Jeff,
> >
> > Try:
> >
> > gmirror forget ad6s1
> >
> > >From gmirror(8):
> >
> > remove      Remove the given component(s) from the mirror and clear meta-
> >             data on it.
> >
> > and futher on:
> >
> > One disk failed.  Replace it with a brand new one:
> >
> >            gmirror forget data
> >            gmirror insert data da1
> >
> >
> > I had a drive do something similar --- the system wouldn't crash, but
> > a drive just refused to be rebuilt. I used `forget' and it worked like
> > a charm.
> >
> > ~Jason
> >   
> Thanks for that!
> turns out that if I rebuild a mirror once booted from cd via:
> gmirror label -v -b load gm0s1 /dev/ad4s1
> mount /dev/mirror/gm0s1 /mnt
> 
> then I disconnected ad6 and booted from ad4. Once booted, the disk was
> very busy for a long time and now it seems to be working fine.
> 
> However, ad6...
> when I have booted from CD I can't gmirror clean ad6 without getting the
> message about
> 
> "Can't clear metadata on ad6s1: Invalid argument. Not fully done."
> 
> I suspect that something is either mechanically wrong (less likely) or somehow corrupted on ad6...
> 
> How can I wipe ad6 so that I can now try to insert it into the new mirror?

To completely wipe the drive? Try:

# dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/ad6 bs=512

That will zero out the *whole* drive, nothing will be left. You will
also need to make sure you do

# gmirror forget ad6

first; otherwise, I think gmirror will expect to find metadata on the
drive. Read the man page carefully to make sure you are taking the
steps in the right order.

Good luck,
~Jason