[arch-general] dmraid disk failure - howto rebuild new disk - gparted hates Me :-(

[David C. Rankin]

David C. Rankin wrote:
> David C. Rankin wrote:
>> Listmates,
>>
>> 	My Seagate drives are dropping like flies with less than 1400 hours of run
>> time. (that's less than 58 days of service!) 
> <snip>
>> 	That's pretty much where I am now. My next thought is to just use dd to copy
>> the partitions over. I have opensuse on the sda/sdc array (mapper
>> nvidia_fdaacfde), so the drives I am working with are not mounted anywhere and
>> should be easy to work with.
>>
>> 	What says the brain trust? Can you think of any way I was screwing up gparted
>> so it wouldn't even format the copy partitions? What about the dd method? Any
>> hints or gotchas? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.
>>
> 
> Ok, I decided on:
> 
> 	dd bs=100M conv=notrunc if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sdd
> 
> I'll let you know how it comes out ;-)
> 

H E L P !!!

	Here is the situation. the dd rebuild of the new drive worked perfectly.
However, when I went to re-add the drive to the dmraid bios setup, the dmmapper
reference to the drives changed from nvidia_fffadgic to nvidia_ecaejfdi. (the
nvidia bios controller wouldn't allow a formatted drive to be 'added' so we had
to remove the existing drive and create a new dmmapper array).

	What happens during boot is, immediately after the "hooks" for "dmraid" are
called, the boot process dies looking for the old nvidia_fffadgic dmraid array.
When this occurs you are left in the God awful repair environment where the
only thing you can do is "echo *", cd and exit (I'm sure somebody could do more
in this shell, but with no vi, I was dead in the water)

	I have hit the obvious places (fstab, /boot/grub/device.map) and made the
needed changes but when I reboot, the same thing occurs. My thought is that I
have to run mkinitrd or something similar update the kernel image for the new
device mapper name. If that is the case, how do I do it? ... and ... from where
do I do it? (please not that awful "echo *" environment., don't throw me in
that brier patch!) If I must, I must, but I'll need a wiki link (I'm off to search)

	If anyone has dealt with this issue before and can point me in the right
direction here -- please do. Right now I'm "guessing" it is the kernel image,
but if there is another dm related file I need to fix, let me know. Thanks.

-- 
David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.
Rankin Law Firm, PLLC
510 Ochiltree Street
Nacogdoches, Texas 75961
Telephone: (936) 715-9333
Facsimile: (936) 715-9339
www.rankinlawfirm.com