I have four harddrives, hd[efgh]. The raid order should be hd[fgeh]. However I did not have drive hdf (device position 0 in the array), when I created the array. I am trying to add this device (now that it is here) into the cluster at position zero (where it belongs). The only thing I can manage to do right now is to add it as a spare drive. So either I need to know how to add it correctly to begin with, or I need to be able to convert hdf's spare status into a full fledge drive status (though I suppose that doesn't really matter much). I was actually in a much worse position earlier. Not only was hdf added as a spare, but before I even realized this problem a DMA error popped in and cause the whole array to fail. I was terrible panic! I didn't know what to do. When I finally found documentation on the mkraid command (as a recovery tool), I realized I still had a major problem: I didn't know which drives were where! The reason was I just got some fans for the drives too, so I rearranged them without marking them! After trying 8 different combinations (half of the total possible) I finally found the correct one (fgeh). I can now mount my drive again, FEW! I am infinitely relieved about that. But it is still in a degraded mode since I don't know how to add hdf in. My best guess was to do this: Right now my /etc/raidtab has the hdf marked as faulty. I tried just 'raidstop /dev/md1' then turning it on as not faulty in /etc/raidtab and then running 'raidstart /dev/md1'. However this caused it to read the /dev/hdf1's super block instead of the other three! Luckily it didn't try to recover and I could just start over again using mkraid. So my best guess was to run mdadm --zero-superblock /dev/hdf1 (which I have already done), and then try again without marking it faulty. But I am just simply too scared to do that without some sort of ok from someone :) . I'm afraid that it will start reconstruction or something -- in fact I'm mainly worried that it's just too late at night for me to think rationally -- it's already 6am. Could someone help? I do appreciate it greatly -- I have been unlucky to have my series of accidents lead up to this point but very lucky that I still have my data (which is 80% backed up elsewhere, but I would really rather not restore that copy, since the 20% is about 40 hours work that I don't have anywhere to backup -- without deleting some of the other stuff [and deletion is not an option either, of course]). Thank you, thank you, thank you for any advice and at the least sympathy enough to read this far -- I know I tend to be verbose when I get tired. So I'll stop here. I'm including my raidtab -- hopefully my situation (at this point) is plain enough that I do not need any md event logs posted here -- but I will be glad to do that too. raiddev /dev/md1 raid-level 5 nr-raid-disks 4 persistent-superblock 1 parity-algorithm left-symmetric chunk-size 64k device /dev/hdf1 failed-disk 0 # raid-disk 0 device /dev/hdg1 raid-disk 1 device /dev/hde1 raid-disk 2 device /dev/hdh1 raid-disk 3 -Gryn (Adam Luter, the ever thankful). - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
