Hello, I've had a RAID6, which has been running with a failed drive for a while. Last week I finally got around to ordering a handful of drives, which is just as well, since another drive failed this sunday. Now, as some of us know hard drives have an uncanny tendency to fail all at the same time, so after I had installed two new drives and hot-added one of them, another drive failed. This brought the RAID down to four drives out of seven, which of course isn't enough to run the array. However, the reason I'm not panicking yet is that the most recently thrown drives seems to be sorta-kinda working; when I reboot from the four-drive state, I can add the drive and the RAID then begins rebuilding with it (btw, what exactly goes on during that rebuild? It's just the minimal number of drives for the RAID to be functional) -after the rebuild I can mount the RAID, apparently without any file system corruption (I haven't tried a full scan, though - I've been more concerned with adding redundancy). Because of the way the system maps the drives, I've had to reboot for everything to work properly - which it does. I get no weird log messages anywhere. I then hot-add one of the fresh drives, the system rebuilds...and when it's done, it drops the fresh drive *and* the one that was the last to be kicked from the array, leaving the array in a four-drive non-functional state <insert profanity here>. So, that puts me where I was, and I can start over again. I've done this procedure twice because I got the impression that the drive which gets kicked did this because it has intermittent errors, but I've become convinced that the problem is in software rather than hardware. I'm using a 2.6.18 kernel in Debian Sarge with mdadm 2.5.6 - 9.nov 2006 Any suggestions on what I can do about it will be greatly appreciated. Regards, Troels - 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
