Re: Problem with raidframe: bad disk or bad memory, how to tell?

[Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>]

On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 11:30:18AM -0700, Brian Buhrow wrote:
>       Hello.  I have a NetBSD-3.1 system in production which seems to be
> experiencing a filesystem issue on its raid1 root partition.  The symptoms
> are that when we tried to run a backup last night, the dump program never
> completed, and it created an endless dump file.  Also, running fsck on the
> root partition yields inconsistent results, especially when you consider
> that this machine isn't that active.
>       I think that either one of the disks is silently corrupting data,
> or I have some bad memory in the box.  I'm almost certain it's a hardware
> issue, but the question is, how to tell which hardware specifically is the
> problem?  I could try failing one of the disks, but then, if I pick the
> wrong one, I'm really in trouble.  Is there some utility I can use to
> compare the contents of the two disks to see if they're equal?  the box is
> a production box, as I mentioned, so I'd like to avoid bouncing it up and
> down, at least until I've figured out what  the problem is most likely to
> b.
>       Any thoughts?

For each disk you can create a 4.2BSD partition which matches the RAID-1
partition, and so run fsck on each drive independantly.
The matching 4.2BSD partition usually starts 64 sectors after the RAID
partition

-- 
Manuel Bouyer <bouyer%antioche.eu.org@localhost>
     NetBSD: 26 ans d'experience feront toujours la difference
--