Issue with broken disk on Solaris with raidctl – how to proceed

As it turns out, I could not find an answer to this. But I did find a workaround and some good information. First off, this was on 10/08 (U6) of Solaris 10. I booted off a 10/09 boot CD (U8) and found that there's a bug in raidctl on U8. U8 fails with a "Corrupt labe - bad geometry" error. Even when I wiped the disks completely I was unable to re-create a mirror using the U8 boot CD but on U7 (and presumably U6) the exact same command worked. So just a bit of version warning there.

The gist of the workaround went something like this (substitute your disks, paths, etc).

• My partitions were split but I could see the data off the boot CD. I needed a lot of space to do a ufsdump so I imported a large zfs pool. This could mean different things to you, maybe just mount a large partition. Let's call it /mnt/space.
• Copy or dump each of your existing partition table to a file. Remember you're booted off the CD at this point.
  • format (1, p, p) or do a prtvtoc /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0s2 > /mnt/space/partitions.txt
• Backup partitions
  • ufsdump 0f - /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0s0 > /mnt/space/root_c1t1d0s0.dmp
  • ufsdump 0f - /dev/rdsk/c1t1d0s4 > /mnt/space/var_c1t1d0s4.dmp
  • continue for each partition
• Recreate raid (off U7 or older CD, U8 has a bug, fails).
  • raidctl -c c1t0d0 c1t1d0 WARNING: This wipes both drives.
  • Creating RAID volume will destroy all data on spare space of member disks, proce ed (yes/no)? yes
• Label new raid disk with format. You should not receive weird or failed labeling errors in format.
• Lookup your volume with raidctl -l (assuming it's c1t1d0 in these instructions)
• Restore your partition layout.
  • cat /mnt/space/partitions.txt | fmthard -s - /dev/rdsk/c1t1d0s2
• At this point I actually switched to DiskSuite but the restore steps are similar.
• newfs each of the partitions.
  • newfs /dev/rdsk/c1t1d0s0 (through s7, skip s2 obviously)
• Mount and restore each partition:
  • mkdir /tmp/s0
  • mount /dev/rdsk/ctt1d0s0 /tmp/s0
  • cd /tmp/s0
  • cat /mnt/space/root_c1t1d0s0.dmp | ufsrestore xf - (answer yes to root dir permission)
  • umount /tmp/s0
  • repeat for each slice
• Copy the boot block. The path to this file depends on your hardware:
  • installboot platform/SUNW,SPARC-Enterprise-T5220/lib/fs/ufs/bootblk /dev/rdsk/c1t1d0s0
• Unmount everything, export zpools if need be, reboot off the CD.
• Edit your alias from the open boot prompt
  • probe-scei-all
  • show-disks (select disk)
  • nvalias disk Ctrl-Y
  • boot disk
• At this point you should be back to a hardware mirror or perhaps you switched to DiskSuite.

If you want to switch to disksuite in the middle of all this: - backup using ufsdump as above - delete your hardware raid definition - restore partitions to a 1st disk, newfs the partitions on the 1st disk - ufsrestore to the 1st disk, do a sanity boot - then start the regular disksuite install. If you try to do disksuite off the CD all in one-shot, it won't take because the meta service isn't running. You'll get this error: metadb: network/rpc/meta:default: failed to enable/disable SVM service Doing the meta commands won't hurt, they just won't stick. IE: when you reboot off your harddisk, metastat will says "no meta databases found".

As near as I can tell, the answer is "Tough. There is nothing you can do". We heard that, despite the warning the all data would be erased, if you tried to create a RAID set with the three drives it would rebuild the original RAID set. Deleting it at this point wouldn't hurt anything, and we couldn't see what else to do, so we proceeded. Yep, it deleted all the data.

I thought of deleting the question, but I'll leave it here in case anyone does come up with a solution for future use, or if someone googles it only to find out that there appears to be no solution.