Want to do a full reformat

Skelly · Knows DNS is the answer Joined: 21 Jul 2009 Posts: 30

My Xsan system has been acting and I want to rebuild it completely. I am going to be backing up the system to a bunch of backup drives we have prepared so data loss won't be an issue.

I was just wondering how to go through with this. I want to do a total rebuild of the system, including reformatting LUNs and stuff. What's the most efficient way to do so?

I wasn't the one who set up or built the system originally, I was his successor.

snfsguy · RAID 5 Joined: 02 Mar 2010 Posts: 17

If you want to totally nuke the file system, use dd to write 0's over the first 4MB of every LUN.

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/XXX bs=1m count=4

That will destroy the Xsan labels and all hope of ever being able to start the Xsan volume. You will have to relabel the disks and make a new file system using the newly labeled disks.

You can use cvlabel to get the device names for all the Xsan disks.

abstractrude · Xsan Master Joined: 13 Mar 2008 Posts: 561

skelly this is a great time to look at your entire XSAN picture. think about what you want to do with the storage. replace cables. clean up your racks make things look sexy. Smile

Skelly · Knows DNS is the answer Joined: 21 Jul 2009 Posts: 30

Yeah, I didn't end up reformatting after all. The problem that led me to believe that the system had been damaged ended up being a really stupid minor issue that I didn't notice before (had a retired formatted xsan drive inside one of the drive bays of a client computer which was confusing the entire system)