freebsd stable - Jul 2015 - problem with geli and LSI controller

On Sun, 19 Jul 2015 09:16:51 -0700
John-Mark Gurney <jmg at funkthat.com> wrote:
> Marc UBM via freebsd-stable wrote this message on Sun, Jul 19, 2015 at
17:34 +0200:
> > a few weeks ago our Highpoint Rocket Raid controller (hptrr) started
> > biting the dust (spurious channel resets). We bought a LSI 9201-16i
> > (mps) to replace it. Connected to the hptrr were 4 external e-sata
> > enclosures, configured in JBOD mode. Together with two disks connected
> > to the onboard SATA controller, this formed a geli encrypted raidz-2
> > zpool. 
> > Just now, I connected the disks to the mps controller. They show
> > up fine in dmesg. The problem is, when trying to attach the disks
> > formerly connected to the hptrr controller, geli is unable to find the
> > metadata on the disks and errors out with:
> > 
> > "geli: Cannot read metadata from /dev/da4: Invalid argument"
> > 
> > gpart show says "gpart: No such geom: da4"
> > 
> > Trying to restore the geli metadata gives:
> > "geli: Provider size mismatch: wrong backup file?"
> > 
> > Is it possible that the hptrr controller handled the disks in some
> > special way and it's only possible to read them there?
> 
> This sounds like the drives were in raid0 mode, and not raw disk
> mode...  You might be able to recover the disk w/ geli resize,
> assuming only space was added at the end, not at the begining, but
> I have never personally tried that myself...  I'd recommend trying
> on a copy of the drive so you don't loose data if that is possible..
And one more question, directed at the list: even if geli manages to
move the metadata via resize, the gpart metadata is probably still
lost? 

Cheers,
Marc

On Mon, 20 Jul 2015 14:56:46 +0200
Marc "UBM" Bocklet <ubm at u-boot-man.de> wrote:
> > 
> > This sounds like the drives were in raid0 mode, and not raw disk
> > mode...  You might be able to recover the disk w/ geli resize,
> > assuming only space was added at the end, not at the begining, but
> > I have never personally tried that myself...  I'd recommend trying
> > on a copy of the drive so you don't loose data if that is
possible..
> 
> And one more question, directed at the list: even if geli manages to
> move the metadata via resize, the gpart metadata is probably still
> lost? 
Replying to myself again, it appears that the safest way is to get a
Rocket Raid controller identical to the one we had, put it in another
system, connect the disks, import the old pool and move the data to the
new pool on the the LSI controller.

Am I overlooking anything?


Cheers,
Marc