Trond Norbye's Weblog

My disks crashed!

Yesterday I found out the hard way that you are not 100% safe even if you have a mirror.. Both of my disks started to fail, so I wasn't able to boot the computer anymore. I am pretty sure that someone with more admin experience would be able to get the machine back up and running (I must admit that I haven't paid much attention to how grub etc works, so my knowledge about system startup is a bit outdated ;-)). Because I feel I have a big hole of knowledge here, I booted a live cd and imported the ZFS mirror. Luckily for me I had no problems on the filesystems where I had all of my work, so I was able to copy all of it out to another disk (I don't have more than 4 SATA connectors in my machine, so I had to disconnect the SSD cache and plug in an extra disk there). With all my work safe on another hard drive safe on my desk I decided to do the easy thing: just buy two new disks and reinstalled OpenSolaris on those. My original plan was to get two 650GB disks, but when I arrived at the store they didn't have them anymore. Luckily for me he gave me two 1TB disks for the same price, so now I've got plenty of space for ZFS snapshots :-)

Personally I just love ZFS. During the installation of OpenSolaris, I just opened a terminal and typed in:

jack@opensolaris> pfexec zpool attach -f rpool c7d0s0 c9d0s0

And my mirror was up and running :-) I have been upgrading the old machine for a long time, so I have a lot of old "zombies" laying around. Instead of restoring all of them, I decided to just restore my data (/home), and recreate all of the configuration.

Hopefully I'll be done with everything tonight :-) I'm just so glad that I didn't loose a single bit of my data :-)

Posted at 01:55PM Jun 26, 2009 by trond in Personal  |  Comments[1]