Hello linux-raid, I have a home fileserver which used a 6-disk RAID5 array with old disks and cheap IDE controllers (all disks are IDE masters). As was expected, sooner or later the old hardware (and/or cabling) began failing. The array falls apart, in particular currently it has 5 working disks and one marked as a spare (which was working before). The rebuild does not complete, because half-way through one of the "working" disks has a set of bad blocks (about 30 of them). When the rebuild process (or the mount process) hits these blocks, I get a non-running array with 4 working drives, one failed and one spare. While I can force-assemble the failing drive back into the array, it's not useful - rebuild fails again and again. Question 1: is there a superblock-edit function, or maybe an equivalent manual procedure, which would let me mark the "spare" drive as a working part of the array? It [mostly] has all the data in correct stripes; at least the event counters are all the same, and it may be a better working drive than the one with bad blocks. Even if I succeeded in editing all the superblocks to believe that the "spare" disk is "okay" now, would it help in my data recovery? :) Question 2: the disk's hardware apparetly fails to relocate the bad blocks. Is it possible for the metadevice layer to do the same - remap and/or ignore the bad blocks? In particular, is it possible for linux md to consider a block of data as a "failed" quantum, not the whole partition or disk, and try to use all 6 drives I have to deliver the usable data (at least in some sort of recovery mode)? -- Best regards, Jim Klimov mailto:klimov@xxxxxxxxxxx - 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
