Hi ! The story: We are running a Softwareraid 5 with 4 ATA-Discs under Debian. A week ago, one disc (hdi) had 3 reallocated sectors (seems to be stable), so we decided to send it back to Maxtor, because the others discs were fine. After we had built out this disc, another disc (hdm) of this raid array filled our logfiles with a lot of seek errors. We were frustrated. I decided to put the harddisc back in the array and after this shutdown, the raid works and after some troubles [1] the disc was back in the array. There are two partitions (logical volumes-lvm) on the raid, i mounted one (/home..ext3) and copied the data to other discs. No troubles during this operation! Then i tried to mount the other partition. I was able to read directory structures, but if i tried to copy files, i got "I/O Errors". While i tried this, "the raid" (mdadm is started by startscripts) marks hdm as faulty ... The "reallocated sectors" counter of hdm shows an increasing amount of reallocated sectors and the ongoing resync of the raid filled our logs (some hundred MB) -> we sent hdm to maxtor. Now, the raid is running degraded mode.... -snip- server:~# cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid1] [raid5] md1 : active raid1 hdg2[1] hde2[0] 75709248 blocks [2/2] [UU] md2 : inactive hdk1[1] hdi1[4] hdo1[3] 735334848 blocks md0 : active raid1 hdg1[1] hde1[0] 2441280 blocks [2/2] [UU] unused devices: <none> server:~# mdadm --detail /dev/md2 /dev/md2: Version : 00.90.01 Creation Time : Mon Jun 14 18:43:20 2004 Raid Level : raid5 Device Size : 245111616 (233.76 GiB 250.99 GB) Raid Devices : 4 Total Devices : 3 Preferred Minor : 2 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Sun Mar 6 16:40:29 2005 State : active, degraded Active Devices : 2 Working Devices : 3 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 1 Layout : left-symmetric Chunk Size : 64K UUID : 72c49e3a:de37c4f8:00a6d8a2:e8fddb2c Events : 0.60470022 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 0 0 - removed 1 57 1 1 active sync /dev/hdk1 2 0 0 - removed 3 89 1 3 active sync /dev/hdo1 4 56 1 - spare /dev/hdi1 server:~# -snap- I tried a raidstart -snip- server:~# raidstart /dev/md2 /dev/md2: Invalid argument /dev/md2: Invalid argument /dev/md2: Invalid argument /dev/md2: Invalid argument /dev/md2: Invalid argument server:~# -snap- ...entry in messages -snip- kernel: md: autostart failed! -snap- Okay...stopping the raid -snip- server:~# mdadm -S /dev/md2 server:~# cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid1] [raid5] md1 : active raid1 hdg2[1] hde2[0] 75709248 blocks [2/2] [UU] md0 : active raid1 hdg1[1] hde1[0] 2441280 blocks [2/2] [UU] unused devices: <none> -snap- Fine. Okay..reassembling it... -snip- server:~# mdadm --assemble --run --force /dev/md2 /dev/hdk /dev/hdo /dev/hdi mdadm: no RAID superblock on /dev/hdk mdadm: /dev/hdk has no superblock - assembly aborted ---> my fault :-) server:~# mdadm --assemble --run --force /dev/md2 /dev/hdk1 /dev/hdo1 /dev/hdi1 mdadm: failed to RUN_ARRAY /dev/md2: Invalid argument server:~# cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid1] [raid5] md1 : active raid1 hdg2[1] hde2[0] 75709248 blocks [2/2] [UU] md2 : inactive hdk1[1] hdi1[4] hdo1[3] 735334848 blocks md0 : active raid1 hdg1[1] hde1[0] 2441280 blocks [2/2] [UU] unused devices: <none> server:~# -snap- ...and the mdadm --detail above.. Anyone knows whats happening here? I do not know how to get our data on the second partition (xfs there). I hope one of the gurus here is able to help me (and our data) Best Regards Ronny [1] Some troubles ...i solved that with dmsetup ..after that i was able to reassemble the array...german speaking people can read the whole postings, non-german speaking people were able to see "my way" ... here are the my postings (and raidtab too): http://www.sbox.tugraz.at/home/p/plattner/raid5_history/ PS: There are also mdadm --examine - outputs - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html