I could use some help with recovering a raid5. I had two RAID5 using three disks. The 1T disks were partitioned into two halves and each raid5 used one partition from each disk (created this way to be able to add my 500G disks into the raids). Then I added two more disks to the setup, partitioned the same way, and added their partitions to the two raids and asked the raids to grow. The first raid started growing and got around 60% out before the machine crashed and had to be rebooted. The second raid did not start growing and was PENDING. As far as I know, it was still PENDING when the machine crashed. When I ran mdadm to start the second growing, the mdadm command hung waiting for the other grow operation to finish. I ended up killing it after a few hours, hoping to continue the grow operation when the first raid was done growing after 15 days. After the crash and first reboot , the first raid5 is activated and show up as auto-read-only, and the second raid fail to assemble. I did not specify a backup file when growing, as the recipe I found did not mention that it was smart to do. Now I wish I had. Any ideas how I can recover my raid? After reading <URL: https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/RAID_Recovery >, I suspect creating it again is the solution, but am unsure if I should recreate it with 3 or 5 partitions. Trying to assembly result in this: meta:~# mdadm --assemble /dev/md3 /dev/sdd2 /dev/sde2 /dev/sdh2 /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb2 mdadm: Failed to restore critical section for reshape, sorry. Possibly you needed to specify the --backup-file meta:~# How can I know which disks to use when recreating if I want to recreate using only three disks? Is it the three with the active state? This is the content of /proc/mdstat. The md0 and md1 RAIDs can be ignored as they are on two different disks: Personalities : [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] md2 : active (auto-read-only) raid5 sdd1[0] sda1[4] sdb1[3] sde1[2] sdh1[1] 976558976 blocks super 0.91 level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [5/5] [UUUUU] md1 : active raid1 sdc2[0] sdf2[1] 976510912 blocks [2/2] [UU] md0 : active raid1 sdc1[0] sdf1[1] 248896 blocks [2/2] [UU] unused devices: <none> Based on the disks used by md2, I ran "mdadm --examine /dev/sd[dabeh]2" to get the status of the problematic partitions: /dev/sda2: Magic : a92b4efc Version : 00.91.00 UUID : 6dcd10c1:39d083f9:e49659ac:48e50bf6 Creation Time : Sun Oct 26 17:29:27 2008 Raid Level : raid5 Used Dev Size : 488279488 (465.66 GiB 500.00 GB) Array Size : 1953117952 (1862.64 GiB 1999.99 GB) Raid Devices : 5 Total Devices : 5 Preferred Minor : 3 Reshape pos'n : 0 Delta Devices : 2 (3->5) Update Time : Thu Jun 30 11:00:18 2011 State : active Active Devices : 5 Working Devices : 5 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 Checksum : 3274a54b - correct Events : 193913 Layout : left-symmetric Chunk Size : 64K Number Major Minor RaidDevice State this 4 8 98 4 active sync 0 0 8 18 0 active sync /dev/sdb2 1 1 8 34 1 active sync /dev/sdc2 2 2 8 82 2 active sync /dev/sdf2 3 3 8 114 3 active sync /dev/sdh2 4 4 8 98 4 active sync /dev/sdb2: Magic : a92b4efc Version : 00.91.00 UUID : 6dcd10c1:39d083f9:e49659ac:48e50bf6 Creation Time : Sun Oct 26 17:29:27 2008 Raid Level : raid5 Used Dev Size : 488279488 (465.66 GiB 500.00 GB) Array Size : 1953117952 (1862.64 GiB 1999.99 GB) Raid Devices : 5 Total Devices : 5 Preferred Minor : 3 Reshape pos'n : 0 Delta Devices : 2 (3->5) Update Time : Thu Jun 30 11:00:18 2011 State : active Active Devices : 5 Working Devices : 5 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 Checksum : 3274a559 - correct Events : 193913 Layout : left-symmetric Chunk Size : 64K Number Major Minor RaidDevice State this 3 8 114 3 active sync /dev/sdh2 0 0 8 18 0 active sync /dev/sdb2 1 1 8 34 1 active sync /dev/sdc2 2 2 8 82 2 active sync /dev/sdf2 3 3 8 114 3 active sync /dev/sdh2 4 4 8 98 4 active sync /dev/sdd2: Magic : a92b4efc Version : 00.91.00 UUID : 6dcd10c1:39d083f9:e49659ac:48e50bf6 Creation Time : Sun Oct 26 17:29:27 2008 Raid Level : raid5 Used Dev Size : 488279488 (465.66 GiB 500.00 GB) Array Size : 1953117952 (1862.64 GiB 1999.99 GB) Raid Devices : 5 Total Devices : 5 Preferred Minor : 3 Reshape pos'n : 0 Delta Devices : 2 (3->5) Update Time : Thu Jun 30 10:59:48 2011 State : clean Active Devices : 5 Working Devices : 5 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 Checksum : 32779a4d - correct Events : 193912 Layout : left-symmetric Chunk Size : 64K Number Major Minor RaidDevice State this 0 8 18 0 active sync /dev/sdb2 0 0 8 18 0 active sync /dev/sdb2 1 1 8 34 1 active sync /dev/sdc2 2 2 8 82 2 active sync /dev/sdf2 3 3 8 114 3 active sync /dev/sdh2 4 4 8 98 4 active sync /dev/sde2: Magic : a92b4efc Version : 00.91.00 UUID : 6dcd10c1:39d083f9:e49659ac:48e50bf6 Creation Time : Sun Oct 26 17:29:27 2008 Raid Level : raid5 Used Dev Size : 488279488 (465.66 GiB 500.00 GB) Array Size : 1953117952 (1862.64 GiB 1999.99 GB) Raid Devices : 5 Total Devices : 5 Preferred Minor : 3 Reshape pos'n : 0 Delta Devices : 2 (3->5) Update Time : Thu Jun 30 11:00:18 2011 State : active Active Devices : 5 Working Devices : 5 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 Checksum : 3274a505 - correct Events : 193913 Layout : left-symmetric Chunk Size : 64K Number Major Minor RaidDevice State this 1 8 34 1 active sync /dev/sdc2 0 0 8 18 0 active sync /dev/sdb2 1 1 8 34 1 active sync /dev/sdc2 2 2 8 82 2 active sync /dev/sdf2 3 3 8 114 3 active sync /dev/sdh2 4 4 8 98 4 active sync /dev/sdh2: Magic : a92b4efc Version : 00.91.00 UUID : 6dcd10c1:39d083f9:e49659ac:48e50bf6 Creation Time : Sun Oct 26 17:29:27 2008 Raid Level : raid5 Used Dev Size : 488279488 (465.66 GiB 500.00 GB) Array Size : 1953117952 (1862.64 GiB 1999.99 GB) Raid Devices : 5 Total Devices : 5 Preferred Minor : 3 Reshape pos'n : 0 Delta Devices : 2 (3->5) Update Time : Thu Jun 30 10:59:48 2011 State : clean Active Devices : 5 Working Devices : 5 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 Checksum : 32779a91 - correct Events : 193912 Layout : left-symmetric Chunk Size : 64K Number Major Minor RaidDevice State this 2 8 82 2 active sync /dev/sdf2 0 0 8 18 0 active sync /dev/sdb2 1 1 8 34 1 active sync /dev/sdc2 2 2 8 82 2 active sync /dev/sdf2 3 3 8 114 3 active sync /dev/sdh2 4 4 8 98 4 active sync Happy hacking, -- Petter Reinholdtsen -- 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
