Enabling a Slice

It is appropriate to enable a slice when:

• Attempting to recover from possible soft errors by enabling the currently errored slice

• Physically replacing a disk drive in place of a failed one, repartitioning the drive the same as the old one, then enabling the errored slice(s) within the metadevice.

You can enable a slice when:

1. DiskSuite cannot access the physical drive. This may have occurred, for example, due to a power loss, or a loose drive cable. In this case, DiskSuite puts the slices in the "Maintenance" state. You need to make sure the drive is accessible (restore power, recable, and so on) then enable the slices in the metadevices.

2. You suspect that a physical drive is having transitory problems that are not disk-related. You might be able to fix a slice in the "Maintenance" state by simply enabling it. If this does not fix the problem, then you need to either physically replace the disk drive and enable the slice, or "metareplace" the slice with another available slice on the system.

   When you physically replace a drive, be sure to partition it the same as old drive. Note that after the drive has been physically replaced and partitioned like the old one, the task to enable the errored slice(s) is the same as for the first condition described above.

Always check for state database replicas and hot spares on the drive being replaced. Any state database replica shown to be in error should be deleted before replacing the disk and added back (making sure the size is the same) before enabling the slice. You should treat hot spares in the same manner.