Maurice Hilarius (maurice@xxxxxxxxxxxx) wrote on 20 March 2008 22:35: >Given this situation: >7 disks in total >RAID5 of 6 disks, and a hot spare. > >mdadm show the 6 disks, but not the spare. > >As a maintenance question, where one wants to periodically ensure that >the hot spare is both available and good. >How should one best : >1) Verify the hot spare is still available. >2) Verify that the hot spare is healthy? I usually do a dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/spare to write to all sectors and give the drive a chance to remap bad blocks. Then run smartctl with a long test, and smartctl -a to see the results. If there are partitions I use sfdisk -d /dev/disk-in-array |sfdisk -f /dev/spare to copy the partition table from one of the other disks to the spare, or any other (non-manual...) method to restore the partitioning. This can be easily included in the routine array checks. -- 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
