I need your help folks. :-/ I'm running 2.6.13.1 and mdadm 1.9.0. I have (had) four SATA drives in a RAID5 - Maxtor 6B300S0 drives on an Intel D915GEVLK motherboard (ICH6), with ext3. Everything was running great for months and months, until this weekend when three of the four drives developed bad sectors within a few days of each other. (I suspect a bad power supply and fan, with subsequent overheating. I've replaced the power supply and added more case fans, about a day late.) I'll spare you the detailed logs (unless you want them), but basically what happened was this: Disk 2 failed ("Medium Error" - "Unrecovered read error - auto reallocate failed"). Array keeps running in degraded mode with disks 0, 1, and 3. Fine, I pulled disk 2 and started looking for another just like it to buy. Then disk 0 failed, same error. The array went down. I ran badblocks on the three remaining disks. Disks 0 and 3 each had a handful of bad blocks (< 150 each), disk 1 was fine. I ran "mdadm --assemble --force /dev/md0 /dev/sd{a,b,c}". It came up fine. "fsck -f /dev/md0" also ran fine. Copied off the most important stuff, but geez, I just dont have the facilities to back up a terabyte. Ok, so far so good right? Tread lightly, get 3 new disks asap, and it'll probably be ok. I should have gone to sleep at this point, but instead I went and monkeyed with it. I thought, it's running degraded with two flaky disks, wouldnt it be better to put disk 2 (the one that failed first and I pulled it) back in while waiting for the replacement disks to get here? Surely three flaky disks are better than two... So I plugged disk 2 back in and ran badblocks on it, found a bunch, about like on disks 0 and 3. Ran "mdadm /dev/md0 --add /dev/sdc" and it started to resync (is that the proper term?) onto it. So far so good, but then I had the briliant idea of running "fsck -cf" on the array, before the resync finished. It hit the bad blocks on disk 3 and failed disk 3. The array now has two active disks (0 and 1), one half-resynced disk (2) and one failed disk (3). Now, to really cap my evening off, I ran "mdadm /dev/md0 --add /dev/sdd". This added disk 3 back in as a spare. I should have probably rerun the "mdadm -A --force". Sigh. So now I've got two active disks (0 and 1) and two spares (2 and 3). The array is completely unreachable. Please, cluebat me. How do I unhork my raid now? Is it even possible? -- Sebastian Kuzminsky - 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