Adaptec 3210S, 4.9-STABLE, corruption when disk fails

[Uwe Doering]

Don Bowman wrote:
> From: owner-freebsd-stable at freebsd.org 
> 
>>From: Uwe Doering [mailto:gemini at geminix.org]  ...
>>
>>>>Did you merge 1.3.2.3 as well?  This actually should have
>>>
>>>been one MFC
>>
>>Yes, merged from RELENG_4.
>>
>>I will post later if this happens again, but it will be quite
>>a long time. The machine has 7 drives in it, there are only
>>3 ones left old enough they might fail before I take it out
>>of service (it originally had 7 1999-era IBM drives, now
>>it has 4 2004-era seagate drives and 3 of the old IBM's.
>>The drives have been in continuous service, so they've lead
>>a pretty good life!)
>>
>>Thanks for the suggestion on the cam timeout, I've set that
>>value.
> 
> Another drive failed and the same thing happened.
> After the failure, the raid worked in degrade mode just
> fine, but many files had been corrupted during the failure.
> 
> So I would suggest that this merge did not help, and the
> cam timeout did not help either.
> 
> This is very frustrating, again I rebuild my postgresql install
> from backup :(

This is indeed unfortunate.  Maybe the problem is in fact located 
neither in PostgreSQL nor in FreeBSD but in the controller itself.  Does 
it have the latest firmware?  The necessary files should be available on 
Adaptec's website, and you can use the 'raidutil' program under FreeBSD 
to upload the firmware to the controller.  I have to concede, however, 
that I never did this under FreeBSD myself.  If I recall correctly I did 
the upload via a DOS diskette the last time.

If this doesn't help either you could ask Adaptec's support for help. 
You need to register the controller first, if memory serves.

    Uwe
-- 
Uwe Doering         |  EscapeBox - Managed On-Demand UNIX Servers
gemini at geminix.org  |  http://www.escapebox.net