From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Johnny Ljunggren Subject: Fix a broken RAID 5 system Date: Mon, 16 Jan 2006 12:45:45 +0100 Message-ID: <43CB8769.4080505@navtek.no> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids Hello everyone! I have a RAID 5 setup of five disks where one of them was set up as spare. A while ago the onboard IDE controller stopped working so I had to move all my harddrives to another machine. It wouldn't start so Knoppix to my rescue. I did some mdadm --examine, and some tests with mdadm --assemble and where partly successfull with this: mdadm --assemble /dev/md0 --force --update=summaries /dev/hda1 /dev/hdc1 /dev/hde1 /dev/hdf1 /dev/hdg1 It complained about one faulty drive, but could mount. I decided to flag drive as faulty, remove and add it. It then started to rebuild the entire RAID. When I checked the next morning though, mdadm --examine showed that /two/ drives now where set as spare, and thus I could not mount the array anymore. Examine now shows (edited): Active Devices : 3 Working Devices : 5 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 2 0 0 3 1 0 active sync 1 1 0 0 1 faulty removed 2 2 0 0 2 faulty removed 3 3 33 1 3 active sync 4 4 33 65 4 active sync 5 5 34 1 5 spare 6 6 22 1 6 spare I'm pretty sure that one of the spare ones is still intact, but how do I change it from being a spare to an active sync? Since I'm still running from Knoppix, please reply to my address too :/ regards Johnny Ljunggren