Hi, Sorry to trouble people, and I am sure you have better things to do, but I can't find an answer to the following and don't know where else to go. I have been struggling with this problem for weeks and having read all I can I still don't know the answer. I have a server running a version of CentOS 5.x Yes, mdadm is old at 2.6.9 but it isn't possible to update it currently. A year or so ago I clean installed with a software RAID 1 array using /dev/sda & /dev/sdb and two partitions, md1 & md2 configure automatically on install. I restored data to the RAID and then added manually added a third drive /dev/sdc as a spare. All appeared hunky dory, but whilst trying to figure a slightly different problem on a different machine, I went back to the first one to check how it was configured. Although I am sure all looked normal when I had last looked, this time is looked a bit strange. Unfortunately I don't have an exact copy of things before I started messing about but it looked something like this : cat /proc/mdstat revealed : Personalities : [raid1] md1 : active raid1 sdc1[2] sdb1[1] sda1[0] 104320 blocks [3/3] [UUU] md2 : active raid1 sdc2(S) sdb2[1] sda2[0] 244091520 blocks [2/2] [UU] unused devices: <none> I don't understand how md1 shows [UUU] ?? On my other machine which has a similar configuration it shows the following which I expect : Personalities : [raid1] md1 : active raid1 sda1[2](S) hdc1[1] hda1[0] 104320 blocks [2/2] [UU] md2 : active raid1 sda2[2](S) hdc2[1] hda2[0] 312464128 blocks [2/2] [UU] unused devices: <none> I thought I could fail and remove the drive, dd/fdisk/reformat, sfdisk and then try to re add it back to the array effectively as a new drive. No joy. If I just fail and remove it md1 shows as [UU_] I have tried checking mdadm.conf which has the following : DEVICE partitions ARRAY /dev/md1 level=raid1 num-devices=2 uuid=8833ba3d:ca592541:20c7be04:42cbbdf1 spares=1 ARRAY /dev/md2 level=raid1 num-devices=2 uuid=43a5b70d:9733da5c:7dd8d970:1e476a26 spares=1 Somewhere along the line the RAID is remembering the earlier configuration but having changed stuff left right and Cambridge, I can't seem to get it to forget. I have tried different variations of mdadm.conf, and tried to rebuild initrd but that didn't fix it and I am clean out of ideas where to go next. mdadm.conf seems to be ignored. Undoubtedly it will take some clever tweaking and I'm scared witless at trashing the array as I am in a different country from the hardware and would struggle to get back to fix it ! Any advice on how to put it back to RAID 1 with a 'hot' spare would be appreciated. B. Rgds John -- 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