> You have found yourself in the same situation I found myself in recently. > Actually my situation was slightly different, but the resulting problem is the > same. In my case at re-boot md decided that one partition of a mirror was out of > sync, and so initiated a re-sync with the other partition. However, the > partition which was active contained a bad sector, so the re-sync failed, over > and over and over..., just like yours is doing. > > In order to fix my system I used the following steps. > > The first step is to take the offending filesystem offline. Then I copied the > existing partition onto the good disk using dd, with the noerror option so it > would continue past read errors. In my case I knew that the read error was not > part of the actual filesystem in use because it passed fsck. When the copy was > complete I ran fsck on the new filesystem just to be sure it had copied ok. > > After this I created a new RAID consisting of just the good partition (in my > case the RAID was md1 and the new partition was sda3): > # mdadm -C /dev/md1 --force -n 1 -l 1 /dev/sda3 > > As a temporary fix, until a new disk arrived, I ran > # e2fsk -c -d -f /dev/sdb3 > to mark back blocks (sdb3 was the failing partition). > Then I ran: > # mdadm --zero-superblock /dev/sdb3 > to remove the md superblock from the partition so it was no longer part of a RAID. > > Finally, I used mdadm to add the dodgy partition back into the RAID: > > # mdadm -a /dev/md1 /dev/sdb3 > > and to grow the RAID to 2 partitions: > > # mdadm --grow -n 2 /dev/md1 Thanks for the assistance with this Nigel. I was able to recover from this 'double' failure with your procedure. I had purchased 2 new disks in order to replace the failed drives and I am back up at this time. Sean
