Hey Oliver, first off: thanks for trying to help me. Oliver Schinagl wrote, On 15.04.2013 00:40:
Firstly, have you written anything TOO the array while resyncing? If not, chances are your array is in a reasonable shape still.
I did write to the array (in fact, I did a bonnie++, which in retrospective is very stupid, and I'm upset I did it, but hindsight is 20/20 - I assumed the array was fine at that time), BUT if you look at the "event count" of each drive, the sdl marked "spare" has an event count just 2 lower then all the others, so they are very close.
Now check the event count for all your drivers and compare. If the 'broken' drive is only a few off (1 or 2 I think i spotted below, try the following)
Exactly.
The 'spare' drive, I don't know what its status is.
According to SMART, it's just fine. Its event status is very close to the others.
Theoretically, I would assume that the resync the data written to the disk is exactly the same as it was before, so keep that in mind as a last resort.
Yes, that's my plan. My question is: HOW can I tell mdadm to use it?
mdadm --run --force -A /dev/md0 /dev/sd...
I've tried that, and it tells me the array can't be started, because I have RAID 5 with 8 drives (in normal situation), 6 good drives, and 2 spares (1 working fine, 1 with hardware failure). So, after this command, I end up in "inactive" operation mode.
Now the broken drive. Check your cables!! and run smartctl on it to give smart a chance to 'fix' the drive somewhat and check its status/health. ... If it fails again (at 80% because of hardware failure) you can't re-use the broken disk. It really is broken :p
It failed twice during resync, at around the same point, and smartctl tells me it's broken, so I assume it's gone for good. (Also, the failed drive is also marked as "spare" currently.)
your very last hope, is to not use the broken drive, and 'force' the above using the earlier marked spare.
How? I haven't managed to do that, that's my whole question. -- 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
