Re: 2 drive dropout (and raid 5), simultaneous, after 3 years

[Michael Stumpf <mjstumpf@pobox.com>]

No idea what failure is occuring.  Your dd test, run from begin to end 
of each drive, completed fine.  Smartd had no info to report.

The fdisk weirdness was operator error; the /dev/sd* block nodes were 
missing (forgotten detail on age old upgrade).  Fixed with mknod.

So, I forced mdadm to assemble and it is reconstructing now.  
Troublesome, though, that 2 drives fail at once like this.  I think I 
should separate them to different raid-5s, just incase.



Guy wrote:

>What failure are you getting?  I assume a read error.  md will fail a drive
>when it gets a read error from the drive.  It is "normal" to have a read
>error once in a while, but more than 1 a year may indicate a drive going
>bad.
>
>I test my drives with this command:
>dd if=/dev/hdi of=/dev/null bs=64k
>
>You may look into using "smartd".  It monitors and tests disks for problems.
>However, my dd test finds them first.  smartd has never told me anything
>useful, but my drives are old, and are not smart enough for smartd.
>
>Guy
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org
>[mailto:linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org] On Behalf Of Michael Stumpf
>Sent: Wednesday, December 08, 2004 4:03 PM
>To: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org
>Subject: 2 drive dropout (and raid 5), simultaneous, after 3 years
>
>
>I've got a an LVM cobbled together of 2 RAID-5 md's.  For the longest 
>time I was running with 3 promise cards and surviving everything 
>including the occasional drive failure, then suddenly I had double drive 
>dropouts and the array would go into a degraded state.
>
>10 drives in the system, Linux 2.4.22, Slackware 9, mdadm v1.2.0 (13 mar 
>2003)
>
>I started to diagnose; fdisk -l /dev/hdi  returned nothing for the two 
>failed drives, but "dmesg" reports that the drives are happy, and that 
>the md would have been automounted if not for a mismatch on the event 
>counters (of the 2 failed drives).
>
>I assumed that this had something to do with my semi-nonstandard 
>application of a zillion (3) promise cards in 1 system, but I never had 
>this problem before.  I ripped out the promise cards and stuck in 3ware 
>5700s, cleaning it up a bit and also putting a single drive per ATA 
>channel.  Two weeks later, the same problem crops up again.
>
>The "problematic" drives are even mixed; 1 is WD, 1 is Maxtor (both 120gig).
>
>Is this a known bug in 2.4.22 or mdadm 1.2.0?  Suggestions?
>
>
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>  
>


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