Question:
I have a bad chunk in a dbspace that is bad and marked “down” by Informix. I don’t really care about the data in that chunk anyway, so I just want to drop it. But when I try to drop the chunk using “onspaces” it says I can’t because it is “down”.

I don’t want to do a restore of the whole database, and I would prefer not unload all the tables in the dbspace which this chunk resides in just to drop the entire dbspace, because that could take days. I believe Informix support can force the chunk to drop, but is there any way I can force the chunk to drop without going through Informix support?

Answer:
You have one possibility. Try first bringing the chunk up using onspaces -s to change the chunk status to “Online”. Then drop the space. This will only work if you cure the underlying problem that took the chunk offline in the first place.

Otherwise, you need to call Informix Support. They will poke around in the rootdbs and probably change the chunk to a blobspace and then drop it.