Good morning to everyone, hope everyone's day is going well. Neil, I sent this to your SUSE address a week ago but it may have gotten trapped in a SPAM filter or lost in the shuffle. I've used MD based RAID since it first existed. First time I've run into a situation like this. Environment: Kernel: 2.4.33.3 MDADM: 2.4.1/2.5.3 MD: Three drive RAID5 (md3) A 'silent' disk failure was experienced in a SCSI hot-swap chassis during a yearly system upgrade. Machine failed to boot until 'nobd' directive was given to LILO. Drive was mechanically dead but electrically alive. Drives were shuffled to get the machine operational. The machine came up with md3 degraded. The md3 device refuses to accept a replacement partition using the following syntax: mdadm --manage /dev/md3 -a /dev/sde1 No output from mdadm, nothing in the logfiles. Tail end of strace is as follows: open("/dev/md3", O_RDWR) = 3 fstat64(0x3, 0xbffff8fc) = 0 ioctl(3, 0x800c0910, 0xbffff9f8) = 0 _exit(0) = ? I 'zeroed' the superblock on /dev/sde1 to make sure there was nothing to interfere. No change in behavior. I know the 2.4 kernels are not in vogue but this is from a group of machines which are expected to run a year at a time. Stability and known behavior are the foremost goals. Details on the MD device and component drives are included below. We've handled a lot of MD failures, first time anything like this has happened. I feel like there is probably a 'brown paper bag' solution to this but I can't see it. Thoughts? Greg --------------------------------------------------------------------------- /dev/md3: Version : 00.90.00 Creation Time : Fri Jun 23 19:51:43 2006 Raid Level : raid5 Array Size : 5269120 (5.03 GiB 5.40 GB) Device Size : 2634560 (2.51 GiB 2.70 GB) Raid Devices : 3 Total Devices : 3 Preferred Minor : 3 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Wed Oct 11 04:33:06 2006 State : active, degraded Active Devices : 2 Working Devices : 2 Failed Devices : 1 Spare Devices : 0 Layout : left-symmetric Chunk Size : 64K UUID : cdd418a1:4bc3da6b:1ec17a15:e73ecadd Events : 0.25 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 8 49 0 active sync /dev/sdd1 1 0 0 1 removed 2 8 33 2 active sync /dev/sdc1 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Details for raid device 0: --------------------------------------------------------------------------- /dev/sdd1: Magic : a92b4efc Version : 00.90.00 UUID : cdd418a1:4bc3da6b:1ec17a15:e73ecadd Creation Time : Fri Jun 23 19:51:43 2006 Raid Level : raid5 Device Size : 2634560 (2.51 GiB 2.70 GB) Array Size : 5269120 (5.03 GiB 5.40 GB) Raid Devices : 3 Total Devices : 3 Preferred Minor : 3 Update Time : Wed Oct 11 04:33:06 2006 State : active Active Devices : 2 Working Devices : 2 Failed Devices : 1 Spare Devices : 0 Checksum : 52b602d5 - correct Events : 0.25 Layout : left-symmetric Chunk Size : 64K Number Major Minor RaidDevice State this 0 8 49 0 active sync /dev/sdd1 0 0 8 49 0 active sync /dev/sdd1 1 1 0 0 1 faulty removed 2 2 8 33 2 active sync /dev/sdc1 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Details for RAID device 2: --------------------------------------------------------------------------- /dev/sdc1: Magic : a92b4efc Version : 00.90.00 UUID : cdd418a1:4bc3da6b:1ec17a15:e73ecadd Creation Time : Fri Jun 23 19:51:43 2006 Raid Level : raid5 Device Size : 2634560 (2.51 GiB 2.70 GB) Array Size : 5269120 (5.03 GiB 5.40 GB) Raid Devices : 3 Total Devices : 3 Preferred Minor : 3 Update Time : Wed Oct 11 04:33:06 2006 State : active Active Devices : 2 Working Devices : 2 Failed Devices : 1 Spare Devices : 0 Checksum : 52b602c9 - correct Events : 0.25 Layout : left-symmetric Chunk Size : 64K Number Major Minor RaidDevice State this 2 8 33 2 active sync /dev/sdc1 0 0 8 49 0 active sync /dev/sdd1 1 1 0 0 1 faulty removed 2 2 8 33 2 active sync /dev/sdc1 --------------------------------------------------------------------------- As always, Dr. G.W. Wettstein, Ph.D. Enjellic Systems Development, LLC. 4206 N. 19th Ave. Specializing in information infra-structure Fargo, ND 58102 development. PH: 701-281-1686 FAX: 701-281-3949 EMAIL: greg@xxxxxxxxxxxx ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ "We restored the user's real .pinerc from backup but another of our users must still be missing those cows." -- Malcolm Beattie - 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