SUMMARY - problems adding a metadb back on a slice (long post)

Original post:
------------------------
Greetings,

We have a E250 Sparc running Solaris 2.6 (SunOS lenbkx0005 5.7 Generic_106541-19 sun4u sparc SUNW,Ultra-250, latests patches applied) with a Raid1 configuration. On a crontab we have an script that runs every day and checks for errors and today we found the following (from the metadb -i command):

  F M     p             unknown         unknown         /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s3
     a m  p  luo        1050            1034            /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s3
     a    p  luo        2084            1034            /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s3
     a    p  luo        16              1034            /dev/dsk/c0t9d0s7
     a    p  luo        1050            1034            /dev/dsk/c0t9d0s7
     a    p  luo        2084            1034            /dev/dsk/c0t9d0s7
     a    p  luo        3118            1034            /dev/dsk/c0t9d0s7
     a    p  luo        4152            1034            /dev/dsk/c0t9d0s7
     a    p  luo        5186            1034            /dev/dsk/c0t9d0s7
     a    p  luo        6220            1034            /dev/dsk/c0t9d0s7
     a    p  luo        7254            1034            /dev/dsk/c0t9d0s7
     a    p  luo        8288            1034            /dev/dsk/c0t9d0s7
     a    p  luo        9322            1034            /dev/dsk/c0t9d0s7
     a    p  luo        10356           1034            /dev/dsk/c0t9d0s7
     a    p  luo        11390           1034            /dev/dsk/c0t9d0s7
     a    p  luo        12424           1034            /dev/dsk/c0t9d0s7
     a    p  luo        13458           1034            /dev/dsk/c0t9d0s7
     a    p  luo        14492           1034            /dev/dsk/c0t9d0s7
 o - replica active prior to last mddb configuration change
 u - replica is up to date
 l - locator for this replica was read successfully
 c - replica's location was in /etc/opt/SUNWmd/mddb.cf
 p - replica's location was patched in kernel
 m - replica is master, this is replica selected as input
 W - replica has device write errors
 a - replica is active, commits are occurring to this replica
 M - replica had problem with master blocks
 D - replica had problem with data blocks
 F - replica had format problems
 S - replica is too small to hold current data base
 R - replica had device read errors


The Sun documentation recomends to erase and add any metadabase that has problems in order to fix any corruption problem:

metadb -d /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s3

That took away the corrupted metadb but now i got the following error trying to add the db back to the device:

bash-2.05# metadb -a -f  /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s3
metadb: lenbkx0005: c0t0d0s3: is swapped on

Solution:
------------------------

Made a mistake and added a metadb on the swap partition (and eventually got corrupted). Don't do this, use instead a free slice in onde of the disks (i made space on an unused hd on the first partition). This is documented in 'Solstice DiskSuite User's Guide ("How to Create State Database Replicas by Allocating Space From
the swap Partition").'

metadb -a -c5 /dev/dsk/c0t10d0s0

Also don't use the -f parameter because you already have replicas.

Thanks to:
------------------------

Dan Astoorian <djast@cs.toronto.edu (swap problem)
Beavers, Reginald" <RBeavers@seisint.com> (why not to use the -f parameter).
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