Intermittent disk failures

Intermittent disk failures

Intermittent disk failures are failures that occur off and on and involve problems that cannot be consistently reproduced. Therefore, these types of failures are the most difficult for the operating system to handle and can cause the system to slow down considerably while the operating system attempts to determine the nature of the problem. If you encounter intermittent failures, you should move data off of the disk and remove the disk from the system to avoid an unexpected failure later. However, intermittent disk failures are also very rare. With intermittent disk failures, you can sometimes observe disks being labelled by VxVM as failing as shown on the slide. If Volume Manager experiences occasional I/O failures on a disk but can still access the private region of the disk, it marks the disk as failing.

Note: If the failing flag is set on a disk, it is not turned off until the administrator executes the following command:

# vxedit -g diskgroup set failing=off dm_name

1.  List the disks under Veritas Volume Manager control to determine which disk is marked bad:

# vxdisk list 

DEVICE       TYPE      DISK         GROUP        STATUS

c0t1d0s2     sliced    disk01       rootdg       online failing

c0t3d0s2     sliced    rootdisk     rootdg       online

........(more)

2.  Clear the failing flag for the disk that is marked as failing:

# vxedit -g rootdg set failing=off disk01

 3.  Verify that the flag has been cleared:

# vxdisk list - to verify that the flag has been changed 

  

DEVICE       TYPE      DISK         GROUP        STATUS

c0t1d0s2     sliced    disk01       rootdg       online

c0t3d0s2     sliced    rootdisk     rootdg       online

........(more)