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I have an HP-UX 10.20 system with a mirror disk pair. I recently had a failed disk, which I'll refer to as "the bad disk". I had to remove it from the system in order to boot successfully. I went through the procedure of replacing it with a new one, which I'll refer to as the "replacement disk", and re-mirrored all of the logical volumes to it from what I'll refer to as the "original good disk".

One of the logical volumes however shows 1 stale extent on the "replacement disk", but I believe it's because the "original good disk" has an I/O problem, as I get I/O errors when trying to do a DD read from it, so it can't read the data from the "original good disk" to mirror to the "replacement disk". I don't get any errors when doing a DD read from the "replacement disk".

I'm able to run the system normally, and boot from both disks without issue.

My question is, I'd like to now replace the "original good disk" with another one that doesn't give I/O errors, which I could do by breaking the mirror, leaving the "replacement disk" as the new master, and re-mirroring to another new disk. But, what does that mean as far as the stale extent that is now on the "replacement disk", as in theory there's no data in that extent to mirror over to another replacement, so will I end up with stale extents even after replacing?

a344254
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1 Answers1

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As this extent is readable from "replacement disk" you can deattach "original good disk", add with new disk, sync the LVs. You will have still one stale extend, but this extent will not be used for files (not sure if this extent will populate on the new disk). If you want to get rid of this extent you need to make backup of files on this LV, destroy it, create it and restore the files.

Romeo Ninov
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    The extent says it's current on the "original good disk", but stale on the "replacement disk", but I believe it's stale because it can't read the data on the "original good disk" to transfer to the "replacement disk". – a344254 Jan 03 '20 at 13:48
  • @a344254, if you are not close to use all diskspace you can ignore it. – Romeo Ninov Jan 03 '20 at 13:53
  • So, since I'm getting I/O errors on the "original good disk", I'd like to replace it. You think breaking the mirrors, replacing that disk, and re-mirroring from the "replacement disk" would be OK? The stale extent that's currently on the "replacement disk" would remain afterwards, if it's mirrorable at all? – a344254 Jan 03 '20 at 18:15
  • IMO yes, this is OK (the replacement). And yes, i think this extent will remain. – Romeo Ninov Jan 03 '20 at 18:25
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    FYI - I was unable to break the mirror as it gave the error 'Physical extents on remaining physical volumes are stale or Remaining physical volumes are not responding'. I'm going in a different route now, to try to generate 1 good disk from another mirrored set – a344254 Jan 07 '20 at 20:15