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Re-adding a failed boot disk

Re-adding a disk is the same procedure as replacing the disk, except that the same physical disk is used. Normally, a disk that needs to be re-added has been detached. This means that VxVM has detected the disk failure and has ceased to access the disk.

For example, consider a system that has two disks, disk01 and disk02, which are normally mapped into the system configuration during boot as disks c0t0d0s2 and c0t1d0s2, respectively. A failure has caused disk01 to become detached. This can be confirmed by listing the disks with the vxdisk utility with this command:

# vxdisk list

vxdisk displays this (example) list:

DEVICE TYPE DISK GROUP STATUS

c0t0d0s2 sliced - - error

c0t1d0s2 sliced disk02 bootdg online

- - disk01 bootdg failed was:c0t0d0s2

Note that the disk disk01 has no device associated with it, and has a status of failed with an indication of the device that it was detached from. It is also possible for the device (such as c0t0d0s2 in the example) not to be listed at all should the disk fail completely.

In some cases, the vxdisk list output can differ. For example, if the boot disk has uncorrectable failures associated with the UNIX partition table, a missing root partition cannot be corrected but there are no errors in the Veritas Volume Manager private area. The vxdisk list command displays a listing such as this:

DEVICE TYPE DISK   GROUP STATUS

c0t0d0s2 sliced disk01 bootdg online

c0t1d0s2 sliced disk02 bootdg online

However, because the error was not correctable, the disk is viewed as failed. In such a case, remove the association between the failing device and its disk name using the vxdiskadm "Remove a disk for replacement" menu item.

See the vxdiskadm (1M) manual page.

You can then perform any special procedures to correct the problem, such as reformatting the device.

 To re-add a failed boot disk

  1. Select the vxdiskadm "Replace a failed or removed disk" menu item to replace the disk, and specify the same device as the replacement. For example, you might replace disk01 with the device c0t0d0s2.
  2. If hot-relocation is enabled when a mirrored boot disk fails, an attempt is made to create a new mirror and remove the failed subdisks from the failing boot disk. If a re-add succeeds after a successful hot-relocation, the root and other volumes affected by the disk failure no longer exist on the re-added disk. Run vxunreloc to move the hot-relocated subdisks back to the newly replaced disk.