[SunHELP] Disk Suite - How to change a failed drive

[Steve Sandau]

>> Long time rescue list lurker, first time sunhelp list poster. I'm a part
>> time administrator of a Solaris 9 server which has recently suffered a
>> disk failure. I'm a linux admin, with a little solaris experience, but
>> nothing worth speaking of with the Disk Suite software.
>>
>> We got a new disk in, but I was unable to follow the usual procedure for
>> removing the disk from the system, as the commands to 'remove' it
>> would hang. I have pulled the old disk and inserted the new disk and
>> attached the disk successfully (I thought). The mirror progressed a fair
>> way into the rebuild ok at any rate. I did leave before the rebuild was
>> 100% complete.
>>
>> Now the disk is displaying as unavailable, but I have noticed that the
>> old disks details are showing up when checking drive status.
>>
>> I think because the old disk wasn't removed properly, the system still
>> thinks it's the drive it wants to talk to.
>>
>> The disk is part of 2 mirrors, and from memory I believe the / filesystem
>> is on one of those mirrors (the system is remote, and I don't have
>> details with me right now).
> 

I replaced three disks today in an E3000 and was able to run metastat 
and look at the output to determine the bad disks. (The metadevices on 
the bad disk show up with a "metareplace" command in the output.) I 
physically replaced the bad disks and ran "devfsadm -C" to tell the OS 
to find the new disks. Then I ran the metareplace command as shown in 
the output of metastat with the addition of the "-e" flag in the 
command. (That flag replaces the bad device with a new device in the 
same position.) You should find that in the man page as well if I am not 
being clear enough.

That worked for me to replace bad disks, and ought to work for any 
mounted partition without a reboot or any interruption in service.

Steve