VERITAS Volume Manager 3.5 Troubleshooting Guide (September 2004)
Recovery from Hardware Failure
Failures on RAID-5 Volumes
Chapter 1
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This is done because if the system were to crash or the volume was ungracefully
stopped while it was active, the parity becomes stale, making the volume unusable.
If this is undesirable, the volume can be started with the -o unsafe start option.
CAUTION The -o unsafe start option is considered dangerous, as it can make the contents of
the volume unusable. It is therefore not recommended.
• The volume state is set to RECOVER and stale subdisks are restored. As the data on
each subdisk becomes valid, the subdisk is marked as no longer stale.
If any subdisk recovery fails and there are no valid logs, the volume start is aborted
because the subdisk remains stale and a system crash makes the RAID-5 volume
unusable. This can also be overridden by using the -o unsafe start option.
CAUTION The -o unsafe start option is considered dangerous, as it can make the contents of
the volume unusable. It is therefore not recommended.
If the volume has valid logs, subdisk recovery failures are noted but they do not stop
the start procedure.
• When all subdisks have been recovered, the volume is placed in the ENABLED kernel
state and marked as ACTIVE. It is now started.