Re: How to fix this superblock?

[Pete <psid@riverland.net.au>]

On Mon, 16 Jun 2014 11:48:29 +1000
NeilBrown <neilb@suse.de> wrote:

> On Mon, 16 Jun 2014 10:59:27 +0930 Pete <psid@riverland.net.au> wrote:
> 
> > Hi all. Please excuse, newbie here, finding out how much I don't know
> > about md.
> > 
> > I have a RAID1 array which is running in degraded mode. When I try to
> > re-add the device that used to be part of the array, I'm told that it's
> > too small, though it used to be fine.
> > 
> > /proc/mdstat:
> > 
> > md1 : active raid1 sdc3[2]
> >       2920305508 blocks super 1.0 [2/1] [_U]
> > 
> > When I try to re-add the device that used to be part of the array, mdadm
> > says it's not large enough:
> > 
> > # mdadm --add /dev/md1 /dev/sdb3
> > mdadm: /dev/sdb3 not large enough to join array
> > 
> > The partition tables hadn't changed when this started. Since then I've
> > re-partitioned sdb to make sdb3 a few GB bigger, but it's still not
> > large enough.
> > 
> > Looking at the working device's superblock, there's a heap of "failed"
> > so I'm guessing that superblock has been damaged:
> > 
> > # mdadm -E /dev/sdc3
> > 
> > /dev/sdc3:
> >           Magic : a92b4efc
> >         Version : 1.0
> >     Feature Map : 0x0
> >      Array UUID : 129ec25f:f07e292a:5bf0829d:19793e6c
> >            Name : pioneer:1  (local to host pioneer)
> >   Creation Time : Thu Nov 21 21:19:12 2013
> >      Raid Level : raid1
> >    Raid Devices : 2
> > 
> >   Used Dev Size : 5841405976 (2785.40 GiB 2990.80 GB)
> >      Array Size : 5840611016 (2785.02 GiB 2990.39 GB)
> >       Used Size : 5840611016 (2785.02 GiB 2990.39 GB)
> >    Super Offset : 5841406232 sectors
> >           State : clean
> >     Device UUID : 6bbc382c:244cf1ad:4fd61c87:4e40e592
> > 
> >     Update Time : Fri Jun 13 17:05:57 2014
> >        Checksum : 93cf5353 - correct
> >          Events : 444384
> > 
> >     Array Slot : 2 (failed, failed, 1, failed, failed, failed, failed,
> > failed, failed, failed, failed, failed, failed, failed, failed, failed,
> > failed, failed, failed, failed, failed, failed, failed, failed, failed,
> > failed, failed, failed, failed, failed, failed, failed, failed, failed,
> >  [snip]
> > failed) Array State : _U 383 failed
> > 
> > 
> > Could it be that whatever happened to the superblock on sdc3 is giving
> > it an incorrect idea of the array size? Is that something I can fix?
> > 
> > Would I be better off creating a new array on sdb3+missing and copying
> > data to that? Then I would zero the superblock on sdc3 and hopefully
> > add it to the new array.
> > 
> > Would appreciate any help.
> 
> I suspect that upgrading to a newer mdadm would solve most of these problems.
> What are you running? (mdadm -V)
> Try:
> 
>   cd /tmp
>   git clone git://neil.brown.name/mdadm
>   cd mdadm
>   make
>   ./mdadm ......
> 
> NeilBrown

Thanks Neil. It's several years old, Ubuntu 8.04:
mdadm - v2.6.3 - 20th August 2007

The server doesn't have git and I can't apt-get it since 8.04 is beyond
support. I will try booting a live CD on it when I get a chance.

I'd like to install a newer system, but it's used for production so
that will take some planning.

Regards.  Pete