SUMMARY: Failing a hard drive

My thanks to:
Vinnie German 
Darren Dunham
Steve Camp
Bill Burge
Will Parsons
Michael Kiernan

for their excellent answers.

Basically, destroying the vtoc will cause Veritas to recognize the drive as
failed.  Below is the meticulous response from Steve Camp:

fmthard -s /dev/null /dev/rdsk/cXtYdZs2

will mess the disk up pretty good.  As you just wiped the vtoc out,
Veritas will be unable to find or communicate with the public OR 
private region and will thus mark the drive as failed.

You may want to save the existing vtoc before nuking the drive:

prtvtoc /dev/rdsk/cXtYdZs2 > /var/tmp/cXtYdZ.vtoc

You can then put the vtoc back on the disk (after having nuked it
with 'fmthard -s /dev/null ...') using the command:

fmthard -s /var/tmp/cXtYdZ.vtoc /dev/rdsk/cXtYdZs2

Note, VxVM also keeps copies of pre-encapsulated vtoc's in
/etc/vx/reconfig.d/disk.d/cXtYdZ/<somethingorother> should you 
decide to nuke an encapsulated disk.

Otherwise, use 'vxdiskadm' to perform disk replacement.

Also, if you do this, VxVM will *have* to perform a full re-sync
of the failed disk.

>  -----Original Message-----
> Managers -
> 
> I want to simulate a failure of a single hard drive in an E4500 running
Solaris 7 to help us walk through our disaster recovery process.  Simply
yanking the drive out is not an option--it is mirrored to another drive in
the same disk tray (via VxVM 3.1) and we don't want to fail the entire
mirror for this scenario.
> 
> We can fail the drive at the Veritas level with vxdiskadm, but I am hoping
someone can offer a suggestion that would make the OS think the drive was
offline/unavailable.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> Daniel Granville
> UNIX Systems Administrator
> CarsDirect.com
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