David -
My experience is identical to yours from steps 1) --> 3). At step 4) my
experience diverged.
My step 4) went like this:
[4] new drive arrives, I install & attempt to boot, like I had several
times while waiting for new hdd when failed drive (hda) was powered down.
[4a] Boot hangs, cant find valid partition(s) (i.e. its only looking at
newly installed drive). For some reason good drive I had been running on
isnt seen.
[5] Put in rescue disk, but it cant find anything on drive (i.e. looking
at new drive only). Therefore cant mount sysimage & do anything to
format the new drive. Need to able to mount the good drive (hdc), the
other half of the degraded arrays.
[6] Dropped to simple shell with no access to tools like mdadm or
sfdisk. No way to format the new drive (at least with my level of linux
skill).
I cant decide if I should file bug against software RAID or whether this
is expected behavior given what happened. My experience with software
RAID & Fedora has been excellent in the past.
I recovered by reinstalling FC6, the refuge for those of us with
insufficient linux skills :-)
Next time I will try knoppix if the drive on the primary controller fails.
