How to remove a subdisk

[stemoser]

Hi,

I wanted to destroy a dynamic DG. I received the following error: "The specified disk is not empty, operation not allowed."

I would like to know how I can delete the subdisk on my Harddisk2 (see picture). So I will be able to delete my DG.

I didn't find anyting in the Veritas Storage Foundation Administrator Guide

Thanks,

Best regards,

Stephane

[Jay_Kim]

Hi Stephane,

To destroy the dynamic diskgroup, all you need to do is right-click the diskgroup (in your case, "testdg") and select destroy dynamic diskgroup.
This should work even if you have volumes created on the harddisks that are part of that diskgroup.
Does your testdg consist of only harddisk2? If so, just destroy the diskgroup and that should not give any error.

However, I believe that what you were trying to do may have been trying to remove a certain harddisk from a diskgroup to get that error. Is this correct?
To remove a specific harddisk from a diskgroup, you will need to delete/move/evacuate the volumes or subdisks from it first.
Basically, you need to make the harddisk fully empty before it can be removed from the diskgroup.
(usually, you just delete the volume that reside on it or move the subdisks to other available disks within that diskgroup)

In most cases, you do not need to nor will it allow you to simply delete a subdisk.
(a volume can consist of multiple subdisks so in this case. you can't simply delete a subdisk(a portion) of that volume)

[stemoser · Accepted solution]

Hi Jay,

At the beginning I had 1 Volume, 1DG and 4 Disks. After a few tests with Windows 2008 I wanted to delete everything.

I was able to delete the Volume and when I tried to destroy the DG (testdg) I received the following error "V-76-58645-598 - The specified disk is not empty, operation not allowed."  The Harddisk2 was the problem. Harddisk1, Harddisk3 and Harddisk 4 were aingain in the Basic Group. I tried to move the subdisk to another disk but SFW didn't accept this operation I swa the following error "...an interface with the unique identifier...".

So I was looking for a command line solution. I didn't find anyting in the SFW Administrator Guide.

By chance I tried the "Replace Disk" command and it's worked!

If I right understand it's not possible to delete a subdisk but it should maybe possible to reinitialise the disk.

Thanks for you help

Best regards,

Stephane

[Jay_Kim]

Hmm. Seems something failed during the destroying of the diskgroup so it completed only partially. But not 100% if this was the case. Glad you were able to work around the issue. We do have a tool called "vxtool" and this is capable to destroying the diskgroup configuration via the command line when all else fails. But unfortunately this isn't a publicly available tool so if you have tried many things and aren't able to, it's probably best to give support  center a call when the time comes.

regards,
Jay