RE: mdadm error when trying to replace a failed drive in RAID5 array

["Steve Fairbairn" <steve@fairbairn-family.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Neil Brown [mailto:neilb@suse.de] 
> Sent: 20 January 2008 20:37
> 
> > md: hdd1 has invalid sb, not importing!
> > md: md_import_device returned -22
> 
> In 2.6.18, the only thing that can return this message 
> without other more explanatory messages are:
> 
>   2/ If the device appears to be too small.
> 
> Maybe it is the later, though that seems unlikely.
> 

[root@space ~]# mdadm /dev/md0 --verbose --add /dev/hdd1
mdadm: added /dev/hdd1

HUGE thanks to Neil, and one white gold plated donkey award to me.

OK.  When I created /dev/md1 after creating /dev/md0, I was using a
mishmash of disks I had lying around.  As this selection of disks used
differing block sizes, I chose to create the raid partitions from the
first block, to a set size (+250G).  When I reinstalled the disk for
going into /dev/md0, I partitioned the disk the same way (+500G), which
it turns out isn't how I created the partitions when I created that
array.

So the device I was trying to add was about 22 blocks too small.  Taking
Neils suggestion and looking at /proc/partitions showed this up
incredibly quickly.

My sincere apologies for wasting all your time on a stupid error, and
again many many thanks for the solution...

md0 : active raid5 hdd1[5] sdd1[4] sdc1[2] sdb1[1] sda1[0]
      1953535744 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [5/4] [UUU_U]
      [>....................]  recovery =  0.9% (4430220/488383936)
finish=1110.8min speed=7259K/sec

Steve.

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