SUMMARY: Help! Self Induced 6540 Catastrophe

My question boiled down to:  Does anyone know if there's a native
firmware command for a StorageTek 6540 to revert a 'reset array'
rather than manually recreating the LUNs .

Answer no.  I received a couple of responses back from members of
the list who'd been in similar positions and their advice was to leave it to

Sun.

I've finally caught up after losing everything on this array. We
don't back it up as the data can be regenerated, it just takes a
while and inconveniences a few people. So I still have a job.

The action plan from Sun Support was to disable LUN initialization
and manually recreate the LUNs using exactly the same underlying
disks as before. I had a file containing a human readable configuration
of the array generated by Sun's support script.

Sun sent out an FE (who told me this was the first time he'd worked on
a 6540) to enter a command via the console (writeZerosFlag=1) given
to me by Sun Support; output was something like "new value added".
Rather than watch over my shoulder, he left and gave me the password
so that I could set "writeZerosFlag=0" when done.
So I recreated the LUNs.  But the very first one showed a status
of 'initializing'  and a dd of the new LUN showed zeros.  I called Sun
Support again and we diffed the old/new configuration and verified
it was good.  So I was SOL, my data was gone.

I did confirm that the writeZerosFlag value should be set to 1, as to
me, that seemed backwards.  They didn't have anything else to offer.

I did find a reference to the writeZerosFlag=1 (thanks Google) in the
'A1000 and A3x00/A3500FC Best Practices guide'.  It's possible those
arrays have related firmware.  In that document it says "However, if
the output says anything like: 'new value added to table,' something
was done incorrectly within the VKI_EDIT_OPTIONS. Do not proceed.".

I do have one useful command that is worth passing on.  'sscs', the
CAM command line tool provides an "export array" command that allows
you to export your configuration to an XML file.

Next time.
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