I've tried sending this twice now (it was my first post to the list) but it never seems to make it through. Resending in multiple parts to see if it's just too long. PART 1: First let me outline where I am and how I got to this point. About a week ago I created a RAID array on my Gentoo server. I already had a handful of full, independent drives on that server, and 3 new empty ones. The three new 1.5TB SATA drives are in an external e-SATA enclosure, along with 2 of the existing drives (750GB each). The e-SATA enclosure is connected to the server with a Syba SD-SA2PEX-2E card (SIL3132 chipset) since it supports port multiplying. The other 4 drives (2 1.5TB, 2 750GB) are still mounted in the server itself. My goal was to end up with all the drives (9) in a single RAID 6 array to use as a storage partition (not for any system files). I only had 3 clean ones, so I wanted to start with RAID 5, use that new space to clear off some of the other drives, and bootstrap up to a RAID 6. My first step was to update to the newest stable gentoo kernel (2.6.35-gentoo-r4) to be sure I had reasonably current mdadm support. No problems during that upgrade. Then I created 1.5 TB partitions (type 0xDA) on each of the 3 new (empty) drives and assembled them into a RAID 5 array (md0). Once that was finished resyncing I created an ext4 filesystem and started copying over everything that was on the 2 750GB drives in the same enclosure. Once that was done (no problems) and the 750s were empty I created a RAID 0 (md1) from them. I created a 1.5TB partition on md1 just like I had on a bare drives, and then added that partition to md0 as a hot spare. I've seen that approach in several RAID tutorials - it seems like the only way to get these undersized drives into the same RAID 6. Then I switched md0 over to a RAID 6, using that hot spare. The reshaping was SLOW (4MB/s) but that seems to be par for the course in a RAID5->RAID6 transition. It was during this reshaping that I saw my first lockup. I was monitoring things via SSH, and the reshaping was about 13% complete. The filesystem was mounted but wasn't being written to (or even read much). I noticed my SSH session had stopped responding, so I tried creating a new one in a fresh terminal. I was able to enter my password, see the MOTD, and get a prompt, but couldn't type anything into it. Tried this several times with no luck. Physically sat down at the computer (no X running) and couldn't even get the screen to wake up. The monitor's LED made it seem awake, but I only got a black screen and couldn't even Ctrl-Alt-F2 to get a fresh terminal. CONTINUED IN PART 2 -- 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
