Hi, I'm running Red Hat Linux 7.3 - with the 2.4.20-20.7 kernels. I have a raid array of 7 73GB u160 scsi disks. I had a disk failure on one disk. This is in a dell powervault 220S drive array. I ran: mdadm /dev/md1 --remove /dev/sdd1 I removed the failed disk. Inserted the new disk. Partitioned it and ran: mdadm /dev/md1 --add /dev/sdd1 the drive reconstructed and everything seems happy. This has happened on 2 separate disks at different times and it has recovered both times. When I do a mdadm -D /dev/md1 it lists out very oddly: mdadm -D /dev/md1 /dev/md1: Version : 00.90.00 Creation Time : Wed Nov 6 11:09:01 2002 Raid Level : raid5 Array Size : 430091520 (410.17 GiB 440.41 GB) Device Size : 71681920 (68.36 GiB 73.40 GB) Raid Devices : 7 Total Devices : 7 Preferred Minor : 1 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Sat Sep 6 14:53:58 2003 State : dirty, no-errors Active Devices : 7 Working Devices : 5 Failed Devices : 2 Spare Devices : 0 Layout : left-asymmetric Chunk Size : 64K Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 8 17 0 active sync /dev/sdb1 1 8 33 1 active sync /dev/sdc1 2 8 49 2 active sync /dev/sdd1 3 8 65 3 active sync /dev/sde1 4 8 81 4 active sync /dev/sdf1 5 8 97 5 active sync /dev/sdg1 6 8 113 6 active sync /dev/sdh1 UUID : 3b48fd52:94bb97fd:89437dea:126fd0fc Events : 0.82 So why does this say - 5 working devices, 2 failed devices and 7 active devices? It seems like it should read: 7 active devices and 7 working devices. In addition, I can't get State: dirty, no-errors to go away. I considered recreating this array with: mdadm -C /dev/md1 -l 5 -n 7 -c 64 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 \ /dev/sde1 /dev/sdf1 /dev/sdg1 /dev/sdh1 but I was a little leery that I might screw something up. There is a lot of important data on this array. The only other thing that is very odd is that on boot the system always claims to fail to start the array, that there are too few drives. But then it starts, mounts and the data all looks good. I've compared big chunks of the data with md5sum and it's valid. So I think it has something to do with the Working Device counts. Is that the case? This is on mdadm 1.2.0. Thanks -sv - 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