Hi I have ran into a serious problem with my raid5 array and need expert help on this one. My array is with 5x500GB disks none spare, I've accidentally did a unclean shutdown of the server. When it came up it gave me this error: Dec 15 09:07:11 ares kernel: md: kicking non-fresh hdk1 from array! Dec 15 09:07:11 ares kernel: md: unbind<hdk1> Dec 15 09:07:11 ares kernel: md: export_rdev(hdk1) Dec 15 09:07:11 ares kernel: md: md0: raid array is not clean -- starting background reconstruction Dec 15 09:07:11 ares kernel: raid5: device hde1 operational as raid disk 0 Dec 15 09:07:11 ares kernel: raid5: device sda1 operational as raid disk 4 Dec 15 09:07:11 ares kernel: raid5: device hdi1 operational as raid disk 2 Dec 15 09:07:11 ares kernel: raid5: device hdg1 operational as raid disk 1 Dec 15 09:07:11 ares kernel: raid5: cannot start dirty degraded array for md0 However i managed to get this back up with remove and add, the system was rebuilding the array. around 70-80% in the process i was going to prepare to decrypt it (luks crypted) so I'm going to mount the usb stick witch has the encryption key however when i was going to mount it i tried to mount wrong device, resulting trying to mount a device in the array (sda1) i hit repeatedly crtl+c, now taking a look at the details on the array it looks like this: /dev/md0: Version : 00.90.03 Creation Time : Mon Feb 4 18:25:28 2008 Raid Level : raid5 Array Size : 1953535744 (1863.04 GiB 2000.42 GB) Device Size : 488383936 (465.76 GiB 500.11 GB) Raid Devices : 5 Total Devices : 5 Preferred Minor : 0 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Mon Dec 15 16:02:54 2008 State : clean, degraded Active Devices : 3 Working Devices : 4 Failed Devices : 1 Spare Devices : 1 Layout : left-symmetric Chunk Size : 64K UUID : 856a6e4e:a1663e98:9efbd2b1:7507133b Events : 0.74 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 33 1 0 active sync /dev/hde1 1 34 1 1 active sync /dev/hdg1 2 56 1 2 active sync /dev/hdi1 3 0 0 3 removed 4 0 0 4 removed 5 57 1 - spare /dev/hdk1 6 8 1 - faulty spare /dev/sda1 a quick summary: hdk1 was the one failing in the first place, witch was about to get rebuild, sda1 was the device i tried to mount while reconstruction the data. As you can see, hdk1 is now marked as spare and sda1 a faulty spare. I have not touch the array after this. Can anyone help me out? How can i force mdadm to set the sda1 to active sync so i can mount the array and start a backup? Can i use dd_rescue to file of all of the disks and play with it? All help is appreciated! /Roy -- 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