Recovering from offline volumes using the CLI

If a Tier 3 recovery procedure completes with offline volumes, then it is likely that the data which was in the write-cache of the node canisters was lost during the failure that caused all of the node canisters to lose the block storage system cluster state. You can use the command-line interface (CLI) to acknowledge that there was lost data lost from the write-cache, and bring the volume back online to attempt to deal with the data loss.

If you have run the recovery procedure but there are offline volumes, you can complete the following steps to bring the volumes back online. Any volumes that are offline and are not thin-provisioned (or compressed) volumes are offline because of the loss of write-cache data during the event that led all node canisters to lose their cluster state. Any data lost from the write-cache cannot be recovered. These volumes might need additional recovery steps after the volume is brought back online.

Note: If you encounter errors in the error log after running the recovery procedure that are related to offline arrays, use the fix procedures to resolve the offline array errors before fixing the offline volume errors.

Complete the following steps to recover an offline volume after the recovery procedure has completed:

  1. Delete all IBM FlashCopy function mappings and Metro Mirror or Global Mirror relationships that use the offline volumes.
  2. Run the recovervdisk or recovervdiskbysystem command. (This will only bring the volume back online so that you can attempt to deal with the data loss.)
  3. Refer to What to check after running the system recovery for what to do with volumes that have been corrupted by the loss of data from the write-cache.
  4. Recreate all FlashCopy mappings and Metro Mirror or Global Mirror relationships that use the volumes.
Parent topic: Recover system procedure