Carlos Carvalho wrote:
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.
I hope you disable use as a spare before doing this... If you were so
"lucky" as to have a failure in the array and start using the drive as a
spare while writing zeros to it, you might have an unexpected learning
experience.
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.
--
Bill Davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx>
"Woe unto the statesman who makes war without a reason that will still
be valid when the war is over..." Otto von Bismark
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