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
