Ravi Pokala wrote: > (1) What is the procedure for swapping out a dead drive while the system is > online?
If the drive and the controller support hot swapping, remove it, put a new drive in and do: # atacontrol reinit channel # gmirror forget gm0 # gmirror insert gm0 /dev/newdrive Not many ATA drive+controller combinations are hot-swap-able. > (2) Say a drive dies as a result of a power event, and does not respond to > probing during the subsequent boot. Once I swap out the drive, (how) can I > get the system to re-probe, recognize the new drive, and start > reconstruction? Exactly the same as above. > (3) Will the stock bootloader and kernel be able to boot from just ad6 if > ad4 dies, or is ad4 special because it was the original boot drive? (Or is > this a function of the BIOS?) It's a function of the BIOS but once the kernel boots it will bring up gm0 and proceed from there "as usual". > (4) Say I have two identical machines Foo and Bar, and four identical drives > A, B, C, and D. I insert drive A into machine Foo as /dev/ad4 and install > 6.2-RELEASE. I then insert drive B into Foo as /dev/ad6 and mirror using the > procedure described above. When mirroring completes, I shut Foo down. Can I > then pull drive B out of Foo:/dev/ad6 and install it in machine > Bar:/dev/ad4, install drives C and D as /dev/ad6 on both machines to act as > new mirrors, and effectively clone Foo's installation onto Bar? With creative use of "gmirror forget" and "gmirror insert", yes.
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