Hello. I initially created a RAID5 in degraded mode and copied my data over, wanting to play with the RAID a little bit before committing to it. After a few weeks, I decided to merge in the third drive (previously holding another copy of my data). The kernel used was 2.6.3, and still likely will be. The resync was going swimmingly, until a bunch of errors showed up regarding hdc (drives in question are hdc, hde and hdg, hdg is the new one, mdadm --manage /dev/md0 -a /dev/hdg): hdc: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error } hdc: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=336986835, high=20, low=1442515, sector=336986687 end_request: I/O error, dev hdc, sector 336986687 .... continue every 8th sector to 336986831 the md0: sync done message was generated, but hdc then seemed to be killed: kernel: RAID5 conf printout: kernel: --- rd:3 wd:1 fd:2 kernel: disk 0, o:0, dev:hdc1 kernel: disk 1, o:1, dev:hde1 kernel: disk 2, o:1, dev:hdg1 kernel: RAID5 conf printout: kernel: --- rd:3 wd:1 fd:2 kernel: disk 1, o:1, dev:hde1 kernel: disk 2, o:1, dev:hdg1 at this point, the kernel began to tightly spin on resyncing/sync done. After a reboot and removal of the third drive (leaving it in started another full resync), my data seems fine on the degraded array. I'd like to run badblocks. I know badblocks can handle a md device just fine as a whole, but what about degraded ones? When I add the third drive, will any bad block list be properly used? If I kill that drive, will old bad blocks be removed? If badblocks cannot/should not be run on a degraded array, I'd like to copy whatever I can from the dying /dev/hdc to the badblock-tested hdg. If I simply (without the filesystem being mounted) dd --ifile=/dev/hdc --ofile=/dev/hdg, will that work (different models of the same Maxtor disk)? Then I can swap them, badblock test old hdc independently, and merge it in. Thanks a lot for any help! -- nick black <dank@reflexsecurity.com> "np: nondeterministic polynomial-time the class of dashed hopes and idle dreams." - the complexity zoo - 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