This is unrelated to my other RAID thread, but I discovered this issue when I was forced to hard restart due to the other one. My main raid (md0) is a RAID 5 composite that looks like this: - partition on hard drive A (1.5TB) - partition on hard drive B (1.5TB) - partition on hard drive C (1.5TB) - partition on RAID 1 (md1) (1.5TB) md1 is a RAID 0 used to combine two 750GB drives I already had so that they could be fit into the larger RAID 5 (since all the RAID 5 components need to be the same size). This seems to be a fairly standard approach that is more or less endorsed by the various RAID tutorials I've read through, and it works fine when I start all my arrays manually, with md1 started before md0. But when the system boots up it tries to start all my arrays automatically and the timeline looks like: Detecting md0. Can't start md0 because it's missing a component (md1) and thus wouldn't be in a clean state. Detecting md1. md1 started. Then I use mdadm to stop md0 and restart it (mdadm --assemble md0), which works fine at that point because md1 is up. But aside from the fact that I don't want to do that manually every time I reboot, since md0 was started without the md1 component and then had it re-added it decides the array needs to go through a resync, which takes 10 hours. And that will only get worse as I continue to add more drives. Is there any way to exercise more control over the array initialization order while still having everything start automatically at bootup? Right now I've done no setup like that at all - it all just works. I've been keeping /etc/mdadm.conf updated, but as I understand it that's more for my own reference than the system's. Mike -- 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
