GEOM_STRIPE: Cannot add disk da2c to st0 (error=17). [SOLVED]

[Chris H]

Hello Miroslav, and thank you for your reply...

Quoting Miroslav Lachman <000.fbsd at quip.cz>:

> Chris H wrote:
>> Hello, and thank you for your reply...
>>
>> Quoting Holger Kipp <hk at alogis.com>:
>>
> [...]
>>>
>>> Can you check if you have any fdisk metadata on either of your disks?
>>> Especially as da0, da1, da2 are attached to st0 without problems,
>>> but then GEOM_STRIPE complains about da2c (which looks like a partition
>>> entry)...
>>
>>
>> I cheated, and went into sysinstall > custom > partition
>>
>> chose each of da0, da1, and da2
>>
>> pressed "f" then "no" then "yes". Which forced a "dangerously" dedicated
>> disk. I also chose "w" on all occasions, and each time the response 
>> indicated
>> Successfully written to disk. I then bailed out of sysinstall, then went
>> back, and deleted the partitions, and again, chose "w". Which also indicated
>> "Successfully written to disk". I then bailed out of sysinstall.
>> Having felt the disks were all now clean, I proceeded with the command:
>>
>> gstripe label -v st0 /dev/da0 /dev/da1 /dev/da2
>>
>> ...well, you know the rest of the story. :)
>>
>> Is this not a good (the best) direction to take?
>
> I recommend you to use
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da0 count=1000
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da1 count=1000
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da2 count=1000
>

This is good advice, I decided that if I chose this method, that I should
/really/ just change count=<actual block count reported by drive>. But
decided if I go this route, I might as well bounce the box and simply
use the SCSI's BIOS routine to re-format all 3 drives. So that's what I did,
and guess what - yep, you guessed it; every thing worked (gstripe(8))
as it should have. So good news, nothing wrong within GEOM, and family. :)

Thank you again for taking the time to respond Miroslav.

--Chris


> to clear the begining of the disks. The next step should be to clear 
> the few last sectors, where metadata of GEOM mirror, journal, stripe 
> etc. are stored, so you end up with "clear disks" which you can use 
> in whatever setup you want without problem with old data, partitions 
> etc.
>
> Miroslav Lachman
>