Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 20:29:53 -0000 From: "Kam Salisbury" <netalchemist@hotmail.com> To: grog@lemis.com Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Vinum volume restore help? *UPDATE#2 & Final Message-ID: <F170xbYiMCIqtQvAauN00003c9b@hotmail.com>
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Mr. Lehey, many thanks for your time and putting up with my disjointed information. The machine in question was so badly mangled I could not even get the logs out of it at 1am EST. So... replacements of flakey hardware later this week and it will be reloaded from scratch. What happened? 1. System was runing fine, custom kernel with SMP turned on as well as ATAPI DMA (I know, I know... bad move). All uninstalled hardware was stripped from the custom kernel such as SCSI devices and such. The main system disk, a 10GB Seagate was feeling perky at UMDA4 (HPT366 built in UDMA controller primary channel) on the Abit BP6 dual celeron 400 board with 196MB RAM. The data drives were on the secondary controller, a 20GB Western Digital and a 20.4GB Samsung. They were setup up as a vinum mirror using directions from freebsddiary.org (I know, another mistake as I should have used the freebsddiary stuff as an example and referenced the man pages. I learned a great deal from the man pages after the enevitible happened.) So... there I was running a machine with no real understanding of how the mirror actually works. I do however, have an intermediate grasp of many other functions of FreeBSD. Gosh I love this Operating System. :] 2. So, just like scuba diving, it was not just one thing that went wrong but rather many things gone wrong from the begining tat did me in. I cvsup'ed the system, make build world, make install world, recompiled my custom kernel. I then initiated the begining of the end. I began changing BIOS settings and UDMA modes of the built in HPT366 (Hotrod ATA66) controller in an effort to squeeze performance out of the disks as well as nullify any buffer underruns for my CDRW which is on the standard IDE motherboard controller. That, is what did me in. (Yes, this reply is sort-of meant to stop others from making the same mistakes) At some point in changing UDMA modes the disks slices and labels got trashed beyond recognition. 3. I desperately sent off a plea for help to freebsd-questions and the author of Vinum. Hoping that someone would say the "Oh, no problem just follow these directions..." Sadly, this did not happen. Not only did I not provide good information for people to help me with, I did not fully understand the problem myself. 4. I went back to my paper log of steps accomplished during the install and reconfiguration of the system. Since I did not want to trash the system further (there was data on the vinum mirror that had not been backed up) I fired up VMware on my Win2K box in an effort to duplicate the situation so I could experiment. I also copid off all the files existing from the latest backup (Which was incomplete, again, another thing gone wrong but I had not checked it so I am the only one to fault) to another location for inspection. I looked up the vinum man page and many other unofficial vinum snippits from a newsgroup that Google found. Now I could actually begin to learn from my mistake. I had already accepted that my data was most likely gone. 5. I learned that in modifying the BIOS settings for a storage device and then expecting FreeBSD and vinum to magically know the changes was the number one mistake. That is how the system unstabilized. Where do I go from here. Well, with tail between my legs, my cat dutifully laid behind me in my desk chair as I performed several hardware upgrades to the machine and began reloading it from scratch. Needless to say, now that I have a beginner knowledge of how vinum works I can design my storage solution much better that the hap ahzard way I had previously accomplished. Thanks to all who spent a few (or more) brain cycles on my foolishness. Hopefully, my next questions to the list will be better founded and described. Kam. >From: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> >To: kam@salsolutions.net >CC: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org >Subject: Re: Vinum volume restore help? *UPDATE#1 >Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 10:48:53 +0930 > >[Format recovered--see http://www.lemis.com/email/email-format.html] > >The quoted text was badly mutilated. > >On Monday, 9 April 2001 at 19:10:35 -0000, Kam Salisbury wrote: > > Well, I have been trying to duplicate the situation using VMware (great > > program for anyone just "trying things out") and noticed that one of the > > steps for creating my vinum volumes from the FreeBSD Diary is that I >have to > > "disklabel -e ad3" so that I can change the volume type to vinum. > >Well, nothing against the FreeBSD diary, but it's sad when people >choose to read it rather than the man page: -snipped text _________________________________________________________________ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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