RAID5 Problems

Chris Manning kenricmanning at gmail.com
Wed Dec 21 03:36:47 UTC 2005


Hi folks.  I'm hoping someone can help out with a RAID5 problem I'm having.
I'm running FC4 on a box with 6 disks in a RAID5 configuration for my data
filesystem.  Earlier today I noticed that one of the drives had been removed
from the array for some reason (it was listed as removed, not failed.)  I
checked out the disk and nothing was wrong with it.  So I added the disk
back into the array with mdadm.  Everything was going fine; checking
/proc/mdstat the array was rebuilding and everything seemed happy.  When I
checked back to see how things were with the rebuild, something had gone
wrong.  The drive which I hotadded back into the array showed up as a spare
instead of an active part of the array, and one of the other disks decided
this was a good time to fail.

So at this point I've got one disk that is dead, and another which was
supposed to have been rebuilt, but is a spare.  The array will not restart,
and as far as I can tell, I've now lost all the data on this array.  I
expect that I'm not going to be able to recover the data, but does anyone
have any idea why hotadding the drive back into the array, and watching it
rebuild, would end up with that disk as a spare instead of a proper part of
the array?

I've got to admit that my experiences so far with mdadm have been less than
thrilling.  I really like the older raid tools where you told it which
devices were spares, and the system didn't just decide for you.

Thanks
Chris Manning
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