I've been having a heck of a time sending this - apologies if anyone sees this email more than once (I've not see it hit the lists either of the 2 previous times I've sent it). I?m having an issue with one of my RAID-6 arrays. For some reason, the email wasn?t set up, so I never found out I had a couple of bad drives in the array until last night. Originally, when I looked at the output of /proc/mdstat, it showed that the array was running with 15 out of the 17 drives still running. [gmitch@file00bert ~]$ cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] md0 : active raid6 sde1[19] sdi1[16] sdh1[12] sdf1[4] sdr1[18] sdg1[5](F) sdj1[7] sdo1[22] sdt1[14] sdd1[13] sdl1[0](F) sda1[20] sdb1[1] sdk1[21] sdn1[10] sdc1[2] sdm1[15] sdq1[17] 7325752320 blocks super 1.2 level 6, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [17/15] [_UUUU_UUUUUUUUUUU] [>....................] recovery = 0.4% (2421508/488383488) finish=180.7min speed=44805K/sec As you can see, device 19 (sde1) is showing as a normal member of the array. My original plan was to partition off 500GB from one of the 1TB drives I have spare in the server, add one partition to the array. Once that had been done, I was going to carve off 500GB from the other drive, and let the array rebuild with that. I created the partition on one of the drives and was going to add it to the array, but stopped when I saw that the array was in recovery (I started up ?watch /proc/mdstat? in another window). I went to have dinner, and came back, and found that the array was now very unhappy, and cat /proc/mdstat showed [root@file00bert ~]# cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] md0 : active raid6 sde1[19](S) sdi1[16] sdh1[12] sdf1[4] sdr1[18] sdg1[5](F) sdj1[7] sdt1[14] sdd1[13] sdl1[0](F) sda1[20] sdb1[1] sdk1[21] sdn1[10] sdc1[2] sdm1[15] sdq1[17] 7325752320 blocks super 1.2 level 6, 512k chunk, algorithm 2 [17/14] [_UUUU_UUUUUUUUUU_] With device 19 having gone from a live drive to a spare. I?ve done an examine of all the drives, and the event counts look to be reasonable [root@file00bert ~]# mdadm -E /dev/sd[a-z]1 | egrep 'Event|/dev' /dev/sda1: Events : 1452687 /dev/sdb1: Events : 1452687 /dev/sdc1: Events : 1452687 /dev/sdd1: Events : 1452687 /dev/sde1: Events : 1452687 /dev/sdf1: Events : 1452687 /dev/sdh1: Events : 1452687 /dev/sdi1: Events : 1452687 /dev/sdj1: Events : 1452687 /dev/sdk1: Events : 1452687 /dev/sdm1: Events : 1452687 /dev/sdn1: Events : 1452687 /dev/sdo1: Events : 1452661 /dev/sdq1: Events : 1452687 /dev/sdr1: Events : 1452687 /dev/sdt1: Events : 1452687 /dev/sdw1: Events : 1431553 /dev/sdx1: Events : 1431964 [root@file00bert ~]# All of the events look to be within acceptable limits (are they?) and device 19 (sde1) has the same event count as most of the drives, but for some reason it is now marked as a spare. I?ve not stopped the array yet, but I?ve not written anything to it either. I?m not sure if taking the array down then restarting it with a ?force is the right course of action. My googling isn?t showing a conclusive answer, so I thought I should seek some advice before I went and did something that wrecked the array. What should my next steps to recover the array be? I think all I need to do is somehow to get device 19 (sde1) back believing that it's a real member of the array, rather than a spare? Or should I be kicking it out, and getting things running with sdo1? [root@file00bert ~]# uname -a Linux file00bert.woodlea.org.uk 2.6.32-358.2.1.el6.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed Mar 13 00:26:49 UTC 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux [root@file00bert ~]# mdadm --version mdadm - v3.2.5 - 18th May 2012 Thanks. Graham -- 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