VERITAS Volume Manager 3.5 Troubleshooting Guide (September 2004)

Recovery from Hardware Failure

Reattaching Disks

Chapter 1

Reattaching Disks

You can perform a reattach operation if a disk fails completely and hot-relocation is not

possible, or if VxVM is started with some disk drivers unloaded and unloadable (causing

disks to enter the failed state). If the underlying problem has been ﬁxed, you can use the

vxreattach command to reattach the disks without plexes being ﬂagged as STALE.

However, the reattach must occur before any volumes on the disk are started.

The vxreattach command is called as part of disk recovery from the vxdiskadm menus

and during the boot process. If possible, vxreattach reattaches the failed disk media

record to the disk with the same device name. Reattachment places a disk in the same

disk group as it was located in before and retains its original disk media name.

After reattachment takes place, recovery may not be necessary. Reattachment can fail if

the original (or another) cause for the disk failure still exists.

You can use the command vxreattach -c to check whether reattachment is possible,

without performing the operation. Instead, it displays the disk group and disk media

name where the disk can be reattached.

See the vxreattach (1M) manual page for more information on the vxreattach

command.