Wednesday, July 27, 2011

I/O errors on zfs import?

I've been working on freshening up our backup scripts and I noticed that every time I do a ZFS import, the kernel logs I/O errors on RAID volumes, completely separate from the actual volume I want to import, including already mounted ZFS pools and UFS filesystems. For what it's worth, this behavior was occurring on a Dell r610, with an attached MD1000.

Jul 25 13:59:54 leopard kernel: mfi0: I/O error, status= 12 scsi_status= 0
Jul 25 13:59:54 leopard kernel: mfi0: sense error 0, sense_key 0, asc 0, ascq 0
Jul 25 13:59:54 leopard kernel: mfid1: hard error cmd=read 0-255

It was suggested that I should update the firmware on the disks, so this morning I went and updated all the disks, and the PERC 6/E. Voila! No more I/O errors on import.

For reference, here is the link to the firmware download I used. It is a windows executable that allows you to generate a bootable USB key that contains the firmware updater for the disks. I also used the underlying DOS environment to apply the firmware update for the PERC 6/E, and our brand new PERC H800 that came from Dell with ancient firmware.