Opinions: root mirror recovery

[Brett Albertson]

> Why? Why? ISTR I've replaced root disks in our SSAs by simply
> replacing the disk, initialising it, & adding it as a (bootable)
> mirror. Why all this prtvtoc stuff?

Imagine this scenario:
You install Solaris 2.5.1 on a disk, encapsulate and mirror (Let's call
these "root" and "mirror").

The mirror will not have the original partition information, but root will.
Let's say that root fails one day, and when you replace it, you resync the
mirrors without formatting the disk the original way and encapsulating it.
Now the root also is not encapsulated.

Everything is happy (two mirrored non-encapsulated disks).

Now you want to upgrade to Solaris 2.6.   Ooops.  The first step is to
vxunroot, but you can't because neither disk is encapsulated.  This is the
crux of the problem.

Brett Albertson				brett.albertson@stratech.com
Senior Systems Engineer			voice	(919) 379-8449
Strategic Technologies			fax	(919) 379-8100