Hi Jakob / Nick > > Am I dead or can I "freshen" sda2 so I can at least have 2 > > devices in my array and therefore > > have a chance of either backing off the data or rebulding > > with a new sdc ? > > http://unthought.net/Software-RAID.HOWTO/Software-RAID.HOWTO.html > > Section 6.1 "Recovery from Multiple Disk Failure" I think a pointer to neils mdadm should be included in the howto: Neils tool allows much easier recovery from this situation, as it'll just override the event counter and reuse all the other information. This means that you can't mess up because of incorrect raidtab etc. As Neil wrote recently: mdadm -A /dev/md0 --force /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc2 will only 'force' into the array enough drives to make it work. For a 3 drive raid5 array, it ony needs to force in 2 drives, so it takes the two most recent drives and uses them. They will have all the data on them, but no redundancy. I suggest that after assembling the array, you 'fsck' the filesystem on md0 just to make sure that the data is fine and then simply hot-add the third device: mdadm /dev/md0 -a /dev/sdc If fsck reports lots of error..... maybe try force the assmbly from a different pair of drives. e.g. mdadm -A --force /dev/sda1 /dev/sdc2 and then do the fsck. When doing these fscks to see if recovery worked, make sure you only check but don't write/change anything to the disks. (e2fsck -n for example). - 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