mfiutil / foreign drives

[Tim Gustafson]

I have a server with a 16-disk RAID controller. I have all the disks
configured as RAID0 devices and then they are used to form a ZFS pool.

One of my disks failed recently, and I swapped it out with a
replacement. After that, mfiutil is showing the following:

root@server: mfiutil -u 1 show drives
mfi1 Physical Drives:
17 ( 0.0) ONLINE <WDC WD1000FYPS-0 1B01
serial=WD-WCASJ0721765> SATA E1:S0
18 ( 0.0) ONLINE <WDC WD1000FYPS-0 1B01
serial=WD-WCASJ1612496> SATA E1:S1
19 ( 0.0) UNCONFIGURED GOOD (FOREIGN) <WDC WD1000FYPS-0 1B01
serial=WD-WCASJ0723513> SATA E1:S4
21 ( 0.0) ONLINE <WDC WD1000FYPS-0 1B02
serial=WD-WCASJ2351494> SATA E1:S2
22 ( 0.0) ONLINE <WDC WD1000FYPS-0 1B01
serial=WD-WCASJ1612777> SATA E1:S3
23 ( 0.0) ONLINE <WDC WD1000FYPS-0 1B02
serial=WD-WCASJ2351459> SATA E1:S6
24 ( 0.0) ONLINE <WDC WD1002FBYS-0 0C06
serial=WD-WMATV1490351> SATA E1:S7

When I try to do anything with the "foreign" drive, mfiutil reports:

root@server: mfiutil -u 1 create raid0 E1:S4
mfiutil: Drive 19 is foreign

I've tried to clear the foreign drive like this:

root@server: mfiutil -u 1 foreign clear
Are you sure you wish to clear ALL foreign configurations on mfi1? [y/N] y
mfiutil: Command failed: Invalid parameter
mfiutil: Failed to clear foreign configuration: Input/output error

I even zero'd out the disk, like this:

root@server: mfiutil -u 1 drive clear e1:s4 start

That ran for several hours, but did not fix the "foreign" state of the drive.

I even took the drive back out of the server, ran "dd if=/dev/zero
of=/dev/whatever bs=1M count=1024" to overwrite the disk's partition
table (and then some), and even that did not help.

I installed the MegaCli port and was equally unsuccessful in fixing
the problems.

I've replaced drives in this server a dozen times over the years, and
when it was a FreeBSD 9 box, it never once complained about foreign
disks, despite the fact that this server has received a lot of
hand-me-down disks over the years. This is the first disk I've had to
replace since moving to FreeBSD 10, so I'm thinking that something
changes between 9 and 10 to create this problem.

Has anyone got any clues they can give me about how to get this disk
configured to be a RAID-0 volume so that I can put it into the zpool?

--

Tim Gustafson
t...@ucsc.edu
831-459-5354
Baskin Engineering, Room 313A
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[Mike Tancsa]

On 12/19/2014 12:53 PM, Tim Gustafson wrote:

> Has anyone got any clues they can give me about how to get this disk
> configured to be a RAID-0 volume so that I can put it into the zpool?
>

Havent run into that one. Do you have a spare mfi card you can pop the
drive into ? Perhaps make it a part of a raid1 config (raid1 from the
controller) with another scratch disk, then, through the BIOS clear the
config so the drives are unused/fresh ?

---Mike

--
-------------------
Mike Tancsa, tel +1 519 651 3400
Sentex Communications, mi...@sentex.net
Providing Internet services since 1994 www.sentex.net
Cambridge, Ontario Canada http://www.tancsa.com/

[kpn...@pobox.com]

On Fri, Dec 19, 2014 at 09:53:52AM -0800, Tim Gustafson wrote:
> Has anyone got any clues they can give me about how to get this disk
> configured to be a RAID-0 volume so that I can put it into the zpool?

Can you do it through the card's firmware during the boot process?

I've done that before (on a Dell w/ mfi driver) when mfiutil choked on
me in the recent past.
--
Kevin P. Neal http://www.pobox.com/~kpn/

"What is mathematics? The age-old answer is, of course, that mathematics
is what mathematicians do." - Donald Knuth

[Tim Gustafson]

> Havent run into that one. Do you have a spare mfi card you can
> pop the drive into ? Perhaps make it a part of a raid1 config (raid1
> from the controller) with another scratch disk, then, through the
> BIOS clear the config so the drives are unused/fresh ?

We do not have any spare cards, unfortunately. This is kind ancient
hardware that was donated to us, so we don't have any spare parts.

> Can you do it through the card's firmware during the boot process?

That's a possibility; we'll try that on Monday.

For now, I'm doing a "zfs send" of the pool data to another healthy
server just in case this one dies completely.

--

Tim Gustafson
t...@ucsc.edu
831-459-5354
Baskin Engineering, Room 313A