[rescue] Sun DiskSuite RAID problems

[Carl R. Friend]

    Good morning Rescuers,

    I figured I'd give this one more shot before abandoning all hope on
the matter.

    I've got a dead DiskSuite array created on Solaris 8 that has one
verifiably dead drive (that ain't comin' back) and one that's in the
"Maintenance" state but which reads OK.  On this array is/was a large
archive of GOES-13 satellite images going back to 2004 running until
GOES-13 was decommissioned (as well as a bunch of other interesting
stuff).

    "Is there a way to force the "Maintenance" drive out of that state
and into a "good" state without invoking the RAID-rebuild routines?"

    The good news is that I was able to get what look like good images
off all of the other disks so another avenue might be to write something
to "rebuild" the contents of the dead drive and copy that image to a
different disk and install that one in the original's place.  This
begs a second question:

    "What algorithm did Sun use for the RAID-rebuild tactic?"  If it's
something simple, I might be able to do something "creative" to make
an image of the failed disk.  If it's something ridiculously complex,
then I suppose I should give up, lick my wounds, and move on.  All the
disk geometries are known and documented, the RAID configuration is
known and documented, the location of the metadevice-databases is known
and documented.  This should be possible.

    Ideas?  Abuse?  Suggestions?

    Some level of corruption is definitely anticipated, but the key
parts are likely OK so long as the directory-structures are intact.

    Cheers!
-- 
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| Carl Richard Friend (UNIX Sysadmin)            | Boylston            |
| Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast            | Massachusetts, USA  |
| mailto:crfriend at rcn.com                        +---------------------+
| http://users.rcn.com/crfriend/museum           | ICBM: 42:20N 71:43W |
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