freebsd-update from 8.4 to 9.3 causes gmirror to disappear -- HELP!

[William Dudley]

Warren,

Thanks for your reply.

I think the problem was that the partition failed the "check the integrity
of partition metadata".
The symptom was that /dev/mirrors/gm0 existed, but none of the partitions I
had defined on there.

I reverted to 8.4 RELEASE and for now I have my data back.  I will have to
back it up to a non-mirrored
disk and then go through the freebsd-upgrade process again to get to 9.3.
I have temporarily put
kern.geom.part.check_integrity="0"  in my /boot/loader.conf so that I
should have my mirror when i boot into
9.3. Then I need to figure out how to "fix" the partition table (I didn't
know there was anything wrong with it)
so I can turn the integrity check back on.

Man, I hate when my computer scares the crap out of me.

Bill Dudley


This email is free of malware because I run Linux.

On Thu, Jun 25, 2015 at 6:33 PM, Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com> wrote:

> On Thu, 25 Jun 2015, wfdudley wrote:
>
>  I've been running 8.4 STABLE for a while, but decided to try to use
>> freebsd-update to move to 9.3
>> I have a pair of 2TB drives in a gmirror.  Works fine.
>>
>> I used svn to pull the 8.4 RELEASE source, and built myself an 8.4 RELEASE
>> system.
>>
>> Then, I followed the instructions here:
>> https://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.3R/installation.html
>>
>> And after the first reboot in to the 9.3 kernel, my gmirror is GONE.
>> This is ALL MY DATA, and the freebsd-update database
>> (/var/db/freebsd-update).
>>
>> After discovering that the mirror was GONE, I did this:
>>
>> sysctl kern.geom.debugflags=17
>> gmirror label -vb round-robin gm0 /dev/ad14
>>
>
> That turns off the safety and creates (writes) a new mirror on one drive.
> Please stop writing to those drives and check your backups.  If you are
> lucky, the data is still present on the second drive.
>
>  Which is how I configured the mirror initially (from this
>>
>> http://www.iprobot.net/linux-tutorial/how-to-setup-sofware-raid-in-freebsd/
>> post).
>>
>
> The Handbook has a full section on creating mirrors, but that is not what
> is needed.  Instead, the existing mirror just needs to be mounted.
>
> The problem might be this:
> https://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.0R/relnotes-detailed.html#AEN1277
>
> You do not mention what you mean by the mirror being "gone".  Was there an
> error message?  It might be as simple as editing /etc/fstab.
>