The disks contain a ~2TB Postgresql database so i was unable to copy to another system. The force worked as suggested by Neil. Thanks for the reply Jim ---------- Original Message ----------- From: Dan Stromberg <strombrg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> To: Neil Brown <neilb@xxxxxxx> Cc: jim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx, linux-raid@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx, strombrg@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Sent: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 15:27:04 -0800 Subject: Re: HELP 13 disk raid 5 not starting > On Wed, 2005-11-16 at 10:16 +1100, Neil Brown wrote: > > On Tuesday November 15, jim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote: > > > all, > > > > > > I have a 13 disk raid 5 set with 4 disks marks as "clean" and the > > > rest marked as dirty. > > > > And important question to answer is 'how did this happen'? > > > > > When I do the following command > > > to start the raid set (md0) I get an error. Any ideas on how to > > > recover? > > > > Add '--force' to the 'mdadm --assemble' command. This tells mdadm to > > try really hard to assemble the array, modifying info in the > > super blocks if necessary. > > Be aware that though doing this will normally give you a working > > array, there may be data corruption within the array (it depends > > somewhat on the answer to that first important question). > > I would recommend at least an 'fsck' if that is practical. > > > > The array will be assembled degraded. You will need to add in a spare > > if you are happy that the data is sufficiently intact. > > Before you do anything that might make things worse (--force is a good > thing to try, I'm sure, but sometimes the good thing to try causes > further problems, EG sometimes fsck goes kerflooey on ya), you might > want to see about getting an image backup of all the drives in the RAID > array to some other system, if you have the space. If your array wasn't > that full, you may be able to compress the image backups to good effect. > > - > 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 ------- End of Original Message ------- - 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
