Re: RAIDframe: what if a disc fails during copyback

[Brian Buhrow <buhrow%nfbcal.org@localhost>]

	hello.  In my experience, the copyback feature never worked.  I
found I had to reboot, turning the hot spare C into component C, Add the
replaced B as a new hot spare, reconstruct to it, and reboot again to get
everything back into its proper place.  I forget the exact  problem I ran
into, but I think it had something to do with not being able to add another
hot spare when one was in use, or  the system not recognizing the replaced
component B as a valid thing to copy back to.  If you search the archives,
I'm sure you can find the exchange between Greg and I on the topic.  The
The result of that conversation was, as I remember it, something like,
yes, it's broken and if you'd like to fix it, be my guest.
	So, I'd be curious to know if you can do the copyback without having
to reboot and, once done, how things work.

-thanks
-Brian

On Oct 29,  7:37pm, Edgar =?iso-8859-1?B?RnXf?= wrote:
} Subject: Re: RAIDframe: what if a disc fails during copyback
} There still seems to be confusion on what I did.
} 
} Let A and B be the two original components, C a spare (in the cupboard) 
} and B' be B with the new firmware.
} 
} I start with A and B as the two components of a RAID-1.
} Now B failes. I have a degraded RAID with A alone.
} I plug in C, scsictl scsibus0 scan all all it, add it as a hot spare 
} (raidctl -a C) and initiate a reconstruction (raidctl -F B).
} Now I'm redundant again with A and C. Since I didn't re-boot, RAIDframe 
} knows that B has failed and C is a used spare.
} I now actually un-plug B, plug it into another machine, do some testing 
} (verifying that it may reset on writes), install new firmware, do futher 
} testing (verifying it now doesn't reset on writes) and am about to 
} re-plug it into the orignal server (which won't notice it ever disappeared 
} or that B has turned into B'---as far as this question is concerned, 
} I could have done all this in the original server).
} What I'm now intending to do is to raidctl -B (with A, B' and C installed, 
} of course). After that, I intend to raidctl -r C, then 
} scscictl scsibius0 detach C and finally un-plug C and put it back into the 
} cupboard again.
} 
} My question was about 1. B', 2. C or 3. A failing during the copyback.
} 
} > there was a crop of bad Seagate 500GB disks for a while and they had 
} > a tendancy to fail in mass at the same time.
} My working hypothesis since some five years is that all Seagate discs 
} are bad and bound to fail. We had a series of SATA 250G (the example above 
} is about SAS 146K) drives that failed the same way (dozens of them), 
} got most of them replaced on warranty and had the replacements failing 
} the same way again.
>-- End of excerpt from Edgar =?iso-8859-1?B?RnXf?=