[Lustre-discuss] Lost Files - How to remove from MDT

[Charles Taylor]

We lost an OST several months ago and could not recover it.    We decided to deactivate until we bring some new storage online and can just rebuild the entire file system.    However, now, the MDT still knows about all the files that were on the lost OST and this results in things like "invalid argument" and "?--------?   ?    .." in directory listings.    The files cannot be removed by standard commands.   We end up doing something like....

mv Dir to Tmp
cp -r Tmp Dir   (this produces lots of 'cp: cannot stat ...' for the missing files)
mv Tmp /lost+found (this moves all the missing file names more or less out of the way).

Is there some way to remove these files from the MDT - as though they never existed - without reformatting the entire file system?

Thanks,

Charlie Taylor
UF HPC Center