thanks a lot for your quick reply, you live up to your reputation :) however I sort of randomly decided to just try rebooting, and it magically worked. I don't know if I can say this fixed it forever, but an strace probably won't help now at any rate. as for my other ignorances, once the raid was available i figured them out pretty quickly. in any case, chunks:/mnt/raid5# mdadm --version mdadm - v1.12.0 - 14 June 2005 perhaps things will continue working forever now.. i will be back later with an strace :) thanks again -Jared On 1/12/06, Neil Brown <neilb@xxxxxxx> wrote: > On Thursday January 12, spongebobsquarehat@xxxxxxxxx wrote: > > hi, > > > > I created a raid5 array with 6 parts but one "missing", thus with 5 > > drives. I stuck some data on it and all was well. I rebooted and it > > didn't exist. I think I needed to add something to mdadm.conf or > > whatnot, but anyway. I tried to manually assemble it but it told me > > that one of the drives had no superblock. I did mdadm --examine > > /dev/hda2 (the partition in question) and it tells me: > > > > mdadm: /dev/hda2 is too small for md. > > > > I don't really understand superblocks at all. I google'd around and > > saw some suggestions that such things might be caused by corrupt > > superblocks, really very little information though. Since my data is > > backed up, I decided to try mdadm --zero-superblock /dev/hda2 althogh > > I am not sure whether that will just certainly break things. I get > > the same "too small for md". I tried everything with --force as well > > with no change. The partition in question, btw, is 220GB. > > > > Any ideas? > > You didn't say what version of mdadm you are using. > Can you tell us, and all run > > strace mdadm --examine /dev/hda2 > > and send the output. > > Thanks, > NeilBrown > > > - 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
