In a previous
discussion
about the GRUB boot archive and how it can be regenerated in Failsafe
mode, I mentioned that it will not be as easy as it can be when the root
file system use the md driver. I previously show a method to do this
which necessitate to unmirror one or more file systems when the root
file system is build upon a SVM mirror. This was not very optimal since
a lot of of manipulations are involved, which may lead to human
error(s), and may seems to be a little complicated.
This method was build on Performing System Recovery from the Solaris Volume Manager official documentation, which show up last month on the Sun-Managers mailing list.
Note: Although this test case was done using Solaris 10 10/08 under a virtual machine build upon VirtualBox on latest OpenSolaris release, the instructions must be valid for Solaris 10 1/06 and later.
As we saw before, the system use only a root file system, and a swap device. Both are encapsulated with SVM:
# df -k -F ufs
Filesystem kbytes used avail capacity Mounted on
/dev/md/dsk/d0 6147798 3455578 2630743 57% /
# swap -l
swapfile dev swaplo blocks free
/dev/md/dsk/d1 85,1 8 4194288 4194288
# metastat -c d0 d1
d0 m 6.0GB d10 d20
d10 s 6.0GB c0d0s0
d20 s 6.0GB c1d1s0
d1 m 2.0GB d11 d21
d11 s 2.0GB c0d0s1
d21 s 2.0GB c1d1s1
The idea is to boot on the GRUB Failsafe mode, get the md
configuration from local root file system, and load manually the md
module, hence properly configured. The main advantage is to be fully
self hosted from the Failsafe mode, and not have to manipulate SVM more
than necessary, especially when breaking the mirror, loosing redundancy
for a time.
[...]
Booting to milestone "milestone/single-user:default".
Configuring devices.
Searching for installed OS instances...
/dev/dsk/c0d0s0 is under md control, skipping.
/dev/dsk/c1d1s0 is under md control, skipping.
No installed OS instance found.
Starting shell.
# mount -F ufs -o ro /dev/dsk/c0d0s0 /a
# cp -p /a/kernel/drv/md.conf /kernel/drv
# umount /a
# update_drv -f md
devfsadm: mkdir failed for /dev 0x1ed: Read-only file system
# metainit -r
# metasync d0
# fsck /dev/md/rdsk/d0
# mount -F ufs /dev/md/dsk/d0 /a
# bootadm update-archive -R /a
# umount /a
# reboot
Really interesting!