[clue] HDD "shell game" issue

[foo7775 at comcast.net]

Thanks for the reply Jim, it's much appreciated. When I boot with the new drive in place, it takes (or is assigned) sdB. 

What I was expecting was that the original drives (sda through sdd) would retain their existing configurations, & when I slid the new drive in, it would take the 'sdE' block device which had originally been occupied by the failing drive. Instead, it's appeared to trample all over the sdB drive. And now that that's happened, I can't seem to get the original sdB drive to reappear. I am thinking that I'll use the UUID to force the new drive to take the sdE block device - I just don't know how to get the original sdB drive to reappear. 

It doesn't even list the scsi_device (3:0:0:0) that was originally in use by the original sdB drive, unless I slide either the new or old/damaged drive back into the slot... 

Thanks for the pointer to udev, I'll take a look at that. 

Thanks again, 

T. 
----- Original Message -----

From: "Jim Ockers" <ockers at ockers.net> 
To: clue at cluedenver.org 
Sent: Sunday, June 12, 2016 2:18:43 PM 
Subject: Re: [clue] HDD "shell game" issue 

When you boot with the new drive in place, what is its block device? Is it /dev/sdb or some other device name? 

I understand from your email that your server will boot with the new drive installed if you comment out the fstab entry which references filesystems on /dev/sdb . If the new drive becomes /dev/sdb could you boot up without sdb in fstab, and then while the server is up you could format the drive the way that fstab expects, and then uncomment the sdb lines in /etc/fstab, do 'mount -a' to mount them, and then once you're sure everything is OK, then reboot the server and it should come up normally. Did you try that? 

If the new drive simply won't become /dev/sdb and you need it to become /dev/sdb then maybe you have a persistent block device name? Maybe you could look for & edit udev configs to get rid of the old sdb device config. https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/persistent_block_device_naming It seems like I had to do something like this once but it's been so long I've forgotten the specifics. I know I have to edit udev configs to make ethernet cards get the right ethX id. 

Jim 

On 6/12/16 12:48 PM, foo7775 at comcast.net wrote: 



Hi All, 

I've run into a situation that has me puzzled (& a little bit humbled, actually). I have a server that started out with five drives, sda - sde (no RAID, no LVM). The sde drive has been throwing alerts for a few days, so I went in to the DC to replace it. The drives are hot-swappable, so I didn't expect much problem - but when I inserted the new drive, the server appeared to not detect it - and started to generate alerts for the sdB drive as well. (I'm sure that at least a couple of you can probably see where this is going...) 

After puzzling over the problem for a little while, I found that the new drive had (appropriated|been assigned to) the sdB slot, rather than sdE like I had expected. At that point, I started trying to collect info so that I could recreate the fstab file using 'mount-by-uuid' - but regardless of what configuration I try, I can't seem to get the original sdB drive to reappear: 

If I boot with the drive slot open, I get sda, sdc & sdd. 

If I boot with the drive slot holding the bad/original drive, the server shows sda through sdd. 

If I boot with the drive slot holding the new/unformatted drive, the boot process fails when it's unable to complete checking the drives (server's been up for >450 days), & I had to boot from a rescue drive & comment out the sdb entry in fstab to get the server to complete booting. 

The worst part of dealing with this is that I *know* that it's not a really complex issue - but I am just not seeing how to restore the server to proper function (which has me feeling distinctly inept). I'm sure that there's data that I've forgotten to provide here, so if anyone has any questions, I'll do my best to answer them. 

I would really appreciate any thoughts/suggestions that anyone can provide. 

Thanks in advance. 


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