If you encounter the error message “MD_IOCPROBE_DEV: Invalid argument”, you have a faulty disk mirror or RAID on your Solaris! You are probably already aware of this, otherwise you wouldn’t be searching the net and thus reading this. However, when I had the error, Google couldn’t help – nor did I find anything on SunSolve.
My installation is a Sun Fire V210, running Solaris 8 and Solaris Volume Manager/Solstice Disk Suite 4.2.1. It has been running for a while, but we never got around initializing the mirrors, until last week. Everything went fine and the disks syncronized within a few hours (7o GB disks).
Then I rebooted the server, to make sure I could also boot it from the mirror disk. Went fine as well, but when I checked the disks with the metastat -i command – the disk were resyncing again. And I got this error as the first line output from metastat: MD_IOCPROBE_DEV: Invalid argument.
A few quick tests showed, that the mirrors were resyncing after every boot, even when shutdown nicely (lockfs -fa;sync;sync;sync;init6).
By chance I eventually found a Sun(sm) Alert Notification, mentioning the problem (I was looking for a newer version of Disk Suite) and the patch to solve the problem – 108693.
What bugs me badly is, that I already had installed the patches from the EIS 2.1.23 cd and though the newest 108693 patch is newer than that, even the -18 would have solved the problem. But it didn’t come with the Recommended patches cluster 👿 .
My hope is, that someone else might find this article and thus solve the problem at bit easier, than I 🙂 .