Hi Ladislav, Ladislav Mate wrote: : > I have a RAID-5 volume of 8 physical disks. One of these disks failed the SMART : > self-test with an unreadable block error. Unfortunately I have discovered : > that there is _another_ bad block on another disk. It is a different block, : > so the RAID-5 volume as a whole is still working. But as a whole, the : > RAID-5 volume has at least two unreadable sectors on two different disks. : > : > What is the best way to replace these two failing disks one by one without : > the loss of data? I cannot mdadm --fail one of them, because the : > subsequent rebuild on a new disk would fail on reading the other bad block. : > : > I would like to add the ninth drive to the RAID-5 volume, and put a replica : > of one of the failing drives to it. Then remove the just-replicated drive, : > and do the same with the other failing drive. : When you take a look in mdadm man page and search for --replace you'll find what you are looking for. : : --replace : Mark listed devices as requiring replacement. As soon as a spare is available, it will be rebuilt and will replace : the marked device. This is similar to marking a device as faulty, but the device remains in service during the recov- : ery process to increase resilience against multiple failures. When the replacement process finishes, the replaced : device will be marked as faulty. : : --with This can follow a list of --replace devices. The devices listed after --with will be preferentially used to replace : the devices listed after --replace. These device must already be spare devices in the array. OK, this seems to be a way to go. Unfortunately, the system in question is too old, and its mdadm does not know about the --replace option, according to mdadm --manage --help. So I will look for a newer mdadm and hope the old kernel of that system supports the mdadm --replace. Thanks! -Yenya -- | Jan "Yenya" Kasprzak <kas at {fi.muni.cz - work | yenya.net - private}> | | New GPG 4096R/A45477D5 -- see http://www.fi.muni.cz/~kas/pgp-rollover.txt | | http://www.fi.muni.cz/~kas/ Journal: http://www.fi.muni.cz/~kas/blog/ | Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around. --Eric S. Raymond -- 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