Hi, Could someone tell me whether the dirty flag is kept set during the entire resync of a raid-5 array? (using FC5 kernel 2.6.15) And why isn't a resync aborted when it sees disk errors? Here's the story: A drive was kicked out of the array after reporting a parity error. I ran the short, conveyance and long SMART tests and no errors were found so I thought it must be the cable. I replaced the cable and re-added the failed drive, unfortunately in full multiuser mode. The HDD led came on and a few seconds later it became unresponsive (mouse pointer wouldn't move, ctrl+alt+f1 had no effect) so powered the box down (has no reset button). The next boot failed because I had a dirty degraded array. I booted from the FC5 rescue CD and used mdadm -A --force to clear it and also ran fsck that fixed a pageful of errors. I haven't tried to add the disk back to the raid-5 array. I also have a small (200MB) raid-1 setup on the same disks for the boot partition and while on the rescue CD I experimented with that a bit. When I ran mdadm -A --force on this raid-1 array I also experienced an unresponsiveness: cat /proc/mdstat was hanging for several seconds before displaying mdstat. The parity error messages were appearing in syslog in about 1 minute intervals, but the resync continued according to mdstat. I couldn't do a clean shutdown this time either because that was hanging too for several minutes before I hit the power switch. My main concern is silent corruption. I figured if the dirty bits got set when the raid-5 resync started and it was just hanging while trying to write the re-added disk then chances of a silent corruption should be really low. Am I right? -Tamas - 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
