How to clear Solaris Volume Manager metadb replicas on Solaris 10 x86

It is possible to get a DiskSuite metadb replica into a sufficiently damaged state that it will panic the system in early boot, which is especially irritating when you aren't using it for anything. This can lead to you needing to clear metadb replicas.

(If you get past boot by turning off svc:/system/metainit the system panics when you run metadb or metainit, which is not too helpful for actually dealing with the problem.)

If you don't care about leaving the actual bits intact for potential analysis, I believe you can just dd /dev/zero over the appropriate slice. (Do not do this, however, if you have been tempted into using that conveniently spare slice 8 as a metadb replica.)

The less brutal way out is to boot into the rescue environment, edit your /kernel/drv/md.conf and /etc/lvm/mddb.cf to remove the slice (you must edit both), rebuild the boot archive with bootadm update-archive -R /a, and reboot.

(If you are masochistic you can go through the dance necessary to turn off the metainit service, bring the system up in single user, do this, and then turn metainit back on. But the rescue environment way is simpler.)

Disclaimer: recovering from dropping below metadb replica quorum is beyond the scope of this entry. Besides, I haven't had to do it yet.