On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 11:03:27AM -0700, Nataraj wrote: > fred smith wrote: > > > > Thanks for the additional information. > > > > I'll try backing up everything this weekend then will take a stab at it. > > > > someone said earlier that the differing raid superblocks were probably > > the cause of the misassignment in the first place. but I have no clue > > how the superblocks could have become messed up, can any of you comment > > on that? willl I need to hack at that issue, too, before I can succeed? > > > > thanks again! > > > > > >> Nataraj > >> > I would first try adding the drives back in with: > > mdadm /dev/mdN -a /dev/sdXn > > Again, this is after having stopped the bogus md arrays. Nataraj, that worked fine, didn't need to --force it. Now I'm back to having two devices in md0 and two in md1, and they're the RIGHT two! :) Put the box in single-user mode to do the work, then after the array finished resyncing, rebooted and it came up with the right two md devices. I appreciate your tutoring me on this, you've been most helpful. Thanks a bunch! Oh, can you refer me to any good documentation on how to admin a software raid system? One aimed for people, like me, who are computer literate, but have never trained as a sysadmin, and who don't know much about RAID... thanks again! Fred > > If that doesn't work, I would try assemble with a --force option, which > might be a little more dangerous than the hot add, but probably not > much. I can say that when I have a drive fall out of an array I am > always able to add it back with the first command (-a). As I mentioned, > I do have bitmaps on all my arrays, but you can't change that until you > rebuild the raidset. > > I believe these comands will take care of everything. You shouldn't have > to do any diddling of the superblocks at a low level, and if the problem > is that bad, you might be best to backup and recreate the whole array or > engage the services of someone who knows how to muck with the data > structures on the disk. I've never had to use anything other than mdadm > to manage my raid arrays and I've never lost data with linux software > raid in the 10 or more years that I've been using it. I've found it to > be quite robust. Backing up is just a precaution that is a good idea for > anyone to take if they care about their data. > > If these problems reoccur on a regular basis, you could have a bad > drive, a power supply problem or a cabling problem. Assuming your drives > are attached to SATA, SCSI or SAS controller, you can use smartctl to > check the drives and see if they are getting errors or other faults. > smartctl will not work with USB or firefire attached drives. > > Nataraj > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos -- ---- Fred Smith -- fredex@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ----------------------------- But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. ------------------------------- Romans 5:8 (niv) ------------------------------ _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@xxxxxxxxxx http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos