Recovering From Disk Movement Problems

This section describes how to recover from unexpected problems after moving disks in the Solaris Volume Manager environment.

Disk Movement and Device ID Overview

Solaris Volume Manager uses device IDs, which are associated with a specific disk, to track all disks that are used in a Solaris Volume Manager configuration. When disks are moved to a different controller or when the SCSI target numbers change, Solaris Volume Manager usually correctly identifies the movement and updates all related Solaris Volume Manager records accordingly. No system administrator intervention is required. In isolated cases, Solaris Volume Manager cannot completely update the records and reports an error on boot.

Resolving Unnamed Devices Error Message

If you add new hardware or move hardware (for example, you move a string of disks from one controller to another controller), Solaris Volume Manager checks the device IDs that are associated with the disks that moved, and updates the cntndn names in internal Solaris Volume Manager records accordingly. If the records cannot be updated, the boot processes that are spawned by the svc:/system/mdmonitor service report an error to the console at boot time:

Unable to resolve unnamed devices for volume management.
Please refer to the Solaris Volume Manager documentation,
Troubleshooting section, at http://docs.sun.com or from
your local copy.

No data loss has occurred, and none will occur as a direct result of this problem. This error message indicates that the Solaris Volume Manager name records have been only partially updated. Output from the metastat command shows some of the cntndn names that were previously used. The output also shows some of the cntndn names that reflect the state after the move.

If you need to update your Solaris Volume Manager configuration while this condition exists, you must use the cntndn names that are reported by the metastat command when you issue any meta* commands.

If this error condition occurs, you can do one of the following to resolve the condition:

• Restore all disks to their original locations. Next, do a reconfiguration reboot, or run (as a single command):

  /usr/sbin/devfsadm && /usr/sbin/metadevadm -r

  After these commands complete, the error condition is resolved.

• Contact your support representative for guidance.

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  Note - This error condition is quite unlikely to occur. If it does occur, it is most likely to affect Fibre Channel-attached storage.

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