From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: John Robinson Subject: Re: 4 partition raid 5 with 2 disks active and 2 spare, how to force? Date: Fri, 26 Mar 2010 19:29:56 +0000 Message-ID: <4BAD0B34.9060102@anonymous.org.uk> References: <2E4545D6-8F4E-4779-9103-960C52983A72@brillgene.com> <4877c76c1003250437r346e18en8da0f6f804bef634@mail.gmail.com> <4877c76c1003252038o655b2a29p9d994df27b5d2afd@mail.gmail.com> <6093BE49-EE3B-41B5-9519-C6D5D0496C64@brillgene.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <6093BE49-EE3B-41B5-9519-C6D5D0496C64@brillgene.com> Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: Anshuman Aggarwal Cc: Linux RAID List-Id: linux-raid.ids On 26/03/2010 16:28, Anshuman Aggarwal wrote: [...] > mdadm --assemble /dev/md_d127 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb5 /dev/sdc5 /dev/sdd5 > mdadm: /dev/md_d127 assembled from 2 drives and 1 spare - not enough to start the array. [...] You said sda was broken, so forget that. Goodness knows how sdd5 managed to end up being a spare. I think you want `mdadm --assemble /dev/md_d127 --force /dev/sd[bcd]5`. I don't think you can start it read-only but with a member missing you're not going to get a resync going so this is unlikely to cause data loss. Still, don't do this if you don't believe it's the correct answer, and certainly don't blame me if it wastes your data. Good luck! Cheers, John.