Hi guys,
I just wanted to make sure that the behaviour I observed is as expected.
With kernel 2.6.35.11, under Debian Lenny, I created a RAID5 array with
5 drives, partitioned it, formatted a partition with ext3 and mounted
it. Then, I put some load onto the filesystem with:
dd if=/dev/urandom of=/mnt/testfile
The array started initializing. At that point, I needed to fail and
replace a drive for some unrelated testing, so I did that with:
mdadm /dev/md0 -f /dev/sdc
The result was a broken filesystem which was remounted read-only, and a
bunch of errors in dmesg. Theoretically, one would imagine that failing
a drive on a RAID5 even during initialization should render the array
without redundancy but workable. Am I wrong? Is there something special
about the initialization stage of RAID5 that makes drive failure fatal
during the initialization? If not, then I have a bug to report and I'll
try to reproduce it for you.
If initialisation is special, does that mean that when creating RAID5,
it is advisable to *wait* until the array has fully initialized before
using it, otherwise one risks losing any data that was put onto the
array during the initialization phase if a drive fails at that point?
Many thanks for any input,
Iordan Iordanov
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