From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Simon Subject: Re: spare not becoming active Date: Tue, 3 Jul 2007 17:52:28 -0500 Message-ID: References: <4682C9ED.9040503@gmail.com> <4683DC71.3050200@gmail.com> <87bqetjfj5.fsf@hades.wkstn.nix> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <87bqetjfj5.fsf@hades.wkstn.nix> Content-Disposition: inline Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids > This is normal for a RAID-5 array construction. Rather than force you to > wait for ages until the RAID parity has been written, mdadm creates a > degraded two-element array with a single spare and fails over to it; the > rebuild involved in the failover automatically constructs the parity. Makes sense. And i was aware that it was reconstructing... > > [dev 9, 1] /dev/md1 84AA4AAF.8B2C555E.3F9AE70D.2EEDD5B3 online > > [dev 8, 18] /dev/sdb2 84AA4AAF.8B2C555E.3F9AE70D.2EEDD5B3 good > > [dev 8, 34] /dev/sdc2 84AA4AAF.8B2C555E.3F9AE70D.2EEDD5B3 good > > [dev ?, ?] (unknown) 00000000.00000000.00000000.00000000 missing > > [dev 8, 50] /dev/sdd2 84AA4AAF.8B2C555E.3F9AE70D.2EEDD5B3 spare > > That output is rather strange though, mainly because of the mystic > missing drive with no name. mdadm bug? That missing drive is the story of my life with raid!! You must have missed the previous posts i sent in this thread, where I was getting one active device and two spare (not being active) and 2 missing drives. As if the missing drive were taking the spot of an active one, and the spare waiting could not take that spot. Well, that's how I understood it, with my noobish mind! ;) Worst part is that, even though no trace is left on my system after a reboot (all is written to a tmpfs), even if i was formating the devices (eg: /dev/sdb2) or using `mdadm --zero-superblock ...` They were still being created as missing. Anyway, good news! After reconstruction the output looks perfect, i tried soft failing one device and it came back just fine. Problem was with a real failure (see first post). Thanks, Simon