Hi, I have (had!?) a raid10 built of sd[a-d]3, with 2 far copies on /dev/md2. sda died. Next the ext4 on md2 got damaged beyond fsck repair. This has nothing to do with the raid, but is still relevant. The FS had 2 dirs for which fsck was reporting "have null as parent" Fix<y>", but couldn't really fix it. Anyway the FS is/was still mountable and readable and I decided to get smart. The idea was: physically attach the new sda (I've already received the replacement disk) mdadm /dev/md2 --fail /dev/sdc3 mdadm /dev/md2 --remove /dev/sdc3 (to use its space together with sda for backup & restore) mkfs.ext4 /dev/sda mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdc mkdir -r /mnt/sd{a,c} mount /dev/sda /mnt/sda mount /dev/sdc /mnt/sdc tar cpf /mnt/sda/backup1.tar /home/data/<half/the/data/> tar cpf /mnt/sdc/backup2.tar /home/data/<the/rest> umount /dev/md2 mkfs.ext4 /dev/md2 mount /dev/md2 tar xpf /mnt/sda/backup1.tar -C /home/data/ tar xpf /mnt/sdc/backup2.tar -C /home/data/ umount /mnt/* rm -r /mnt/sd? sfdisk -d /dev/sdb | sfdisk /dev/sda sfdisk -d /dev/sdb | sfdisk /dev/sdc mdadm /dev/md2 -add /dev/sda3 mdadm /dev/md2 -add /dev/sdc3 What happened is that I removed sdc3, mounted md2, saw the data, unmounted md2 and tried to "mdadm /dev/md2 --re-add /dev/sdc3", so I'd go trough the backup & restore routine later. Unfortunately for some reason mdadm added sdc3 as spare. I stopped md2 and tried to assemble it again, but this time mdadm said there wera no eneough drives to start the array and sdc3 was still marked as spare. Is there any chance to get this array working with sd[b-d]3 only and execute the initial plan? -- 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