Hi, I managed to kill a RAID6... My old server mainboard died, the new one did not have PCI-X any more, so I bought it with an Avago 9260-4i, of course after asking (but not verifying in the net, sic) that I can export the disks as plain JBOD. Well, you cannot. So I played around with a set of spare disks and realized that you can configure a RAID0 consisting of a single disk drive, and when you skip the initialization of the array, it basically does what I need. OK, so I added my real disks, and things looked fine. Then I added some new disks and decided to set them up as a HW RAID6 to compare performance. But, when I intended to start initialization of this new RAID6, the Avago firmware silently also initalized all my previously untouched old disks, and boom! The original array was created this way: # mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md2 --metadata=1.2 --level=6 \ --raid-devices=6 --chunk=16 --assume-clean /dev/sd[abefgh] mdadm: layout defaults to left-symmetric mdadm: size set to 976762448K mdadm: array /dev/md2 started. # mdadm -Q --detail /dev/md2 /dev/md2: Version : 1.02 Creation Time : Tue Jan 18 12:38:15 2011 Raid Level : raid6 Array Size : 3907049792 (3726.05 GiB 4000.82 GB) Used Dev Size : 1953524896 (1863.03 GiB 2000.41 GB) Raid Devices : 6 Total Devices : 6 Preferred Minor : 2 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Tue Jan 18 12:38:15 2011 State : clean Active Devices : 6 Working Devices : 6 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 Chunk Size : 16K Name : 2 UUID : 7ae2c7ac:74b4b307:69c2de0e:a2735e73 Events : 0 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 8 0 0 active sync /dev/sda 1 8 16 1 active sync /dev/sdb 2 8 64 2 active sync /dev/sde 3 8 80 3 active sync /dev/sdf 4 8 96 4 active sync /dev/sdg 5 8 112 5 active sync /dev/sdh Now, I see this instead: # cat /proc/mdstat Personalities : [raid0] [raid1] md120 : active raid0 sdf[0] 976224256 blocks super external:/md0/5 256k chunks md121 : active raid0 sde[0] 976224256 blocks super external:/md0/4 256k chunks md122 : active raid0 sdd[0] 976224256 blocks super external:/md0/3 256k chunks md123 : active raid0 sdc[0] 976224256 blocks super external:/md0/2 256k chunks md124 : active raid0 sdb[0] 976224256 blocks super external:/md0/1 256k chunks md125 : active raid0 sda[0] 976224256 blocks super external:/md0/0 256k chunks md126 : inactive sda[5](S) sdf[4](S) sde[3](S) sdd[2](S) sdc[1](S) sdb[0](S) 3229968 blocks super external:ddf # mdadm -Q --detail /dev/md126 /dev/md126: Version : ddf Raid Level : container Total Devices : 6 Working Devices : 6 Container GUID : 4C534920:20202020:10000079:10009260:446872B3:105E9355 (LSI 05/14/16 08:23:15) Seq : 00000019 Virtual Disks : 11 Member Arrays : /dev/md120 /dev/md121 /dev/md122 /dev/md123 /dev/md124 /dev/md125 Number Major Minor RaidDevice 0 8 16 - /dev/sdb 1 8 32 - /dev/sdc 2 8 48 - /dev/sdd 3 8 64 - /dev/sde 4 8 80 - /dev/sdf 5 8 0 - /dev/sda # mdadm -Q --detail /dev/md120 /dev/md120: Container : /dev/md0, member 5 Raid Level : raid0 Array Size : 976224256 (931.00 GiB 999.65 GB) Raid Devices : 1 Total Devices : 1 State : clean Active Devices : 1 Working Devices : 1 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 Chunk Size : 256K Container GUID : 4C534920:20202020:10000079:10009260:446872B3:105E9355 (LSI 05/14/16 08:23:15) Seq : 00000019 Virtual Disks : 11 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 8 80 0 active sync /dev/sdf # mdadm -Q --detail /dev/md121 /dev/md121: Container : /dev/md0, member 4 Raid Level : raid0 Array Size : 976224256 (931.00 GiB 999.65 GB) Raid Devices : 1 Total Devices : 1 State : clean Active Devices : 1 Working Devices : 1 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 Chunk Size : 256K Container GUID : 4C534920:20202020:10000079:10009260:446872B3:105E9355 (LSI 05/14/16 08:23:15) Seq : 00000019 Virtual Disks : 11 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 8 64 0 active sync /dev/sde # mdadm -Q --detail /dev/md122 /dev/md122: Container : /dev/md0, member 3 Raid Level : raid0 Array Size : 976224256 (931.00 GiB 999.65 GB) Raid Devices : 1 Total Devices : 1 State : clean Active Devices : 1 Working Devices : 1 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 Chunk Size : 256K Container GUID : 4C534920:20202020:10000079:10009260:446872B3:105E9355 (LSI 05/14/16 08:23:15) Seq : 00000019 Virtual Disks : 11 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 8 48 0 active sync /dev/sdd # mdadm -Q --detail /dev/md123 /dev/md123: Container : /dev/md0, member 2 Raid Level : raid0 Array Size : 976224256 (931.00 GiB 999.65 GB) Raid Devices : 1 Total Devices : 1 State : clean Active Devices : 1 Working Devices : 1 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 Chunk Size : 256K Container GUID : 4C534920:20202020:10000079:10009260:446872B3:105E9355 (LSI 05/14/16 08:23:15) Seq : 00000019 Virtual Disks : 11 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 8 32 0 active sync /dev/sdc # mdadm -Q --detail /dev/md124 /dev/md124: Container : /dev/md0, member 1 Raid Level : raid0 Array Size : 976224256 (931.00 GiB 999.65 GB) Raid Devices : 1 Total Devices : 1 State : clean Active Devices : 1 Working Devices : 1 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 Chunk Size : 256K Container GUID : 4C534920:20202020:10000079:10009260:446872B3:105E9355 (LSI 05/14/16 08:23:15) Seq : 00000019 Virtual Disks : 11 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 8 16 0 active sync /dev/sdb # mdadm -Q --detail /dev/md125 /dev/md125: Container : /dev/md0, member 0 Raid Level : raid0 Array Size : 976224256 (931.00 GiB 999.65 GB) Raid Devices : 1 Total Devices : 1 State : clean Active Devices : 1 Working Devices : 1 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 Chunk Size : 256K Container GUID : 4C534920:20202020:10000079:10009260:446872B3:105E9355 (LSI 05/14/16 08:23:15) Seq : 00000019 Virtual Disks : 11 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 8 0 0 active sync /dev/sda Yes, I know I was stupid, but can anybody help? Is there a way to get the old RAID6 setup running, just to recover the data (we have backups on tape, but I figure the restore takes long....) For the record: there were also two disks which had partitions which were used for 2 x RAID1 arrays; these survived the Avago's firmware initialization: # mdadm -Q --detail /dev/md126 /dev/md126: Version : 1.0 Creation Time : Fri Jan 21 11:34:46 2011 Raid Level : raid1 Array Size : 262132 (256.03 MiB 268.42 MB) Used Dev Size : 262132 (256.03 MiB 268.42 MB) Raid Devices : 2 Total Devices : 2 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Sun May 15 08:10:48 2016 State : clean Active Devices : 2 Working Devices : 2 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 Name : localhost.localdomain:3 UUID : 28815077:9fe434a1:7fbd6fbb:46816ee0 Events : 847 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 8 97 0 active sync /dev/sdg1 1 8 113 1 active sync /dev/sdh1 # mdadm -Q --detail /dev/md127 /dev/md127: Version : 1.2 Creation Time : Wed Jan 19 07:28:49 2011 Raid Level : raid1 Array Size : 970206800 (925.26 GiB 993.49 GB) Used Dev Size : 970206800 (925.26 GiB 993.49 GB) Raid Devices : 2 Total Devices : 2 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Sun May 15 08:41:23 2016 State : active Active Devices : 2 Working Devices : 2 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 0 Name : castor.denx.de:4 UUID : 0551c50c:30e757d4:83368de2:9a8ff1e1 Events : 38662 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 2 8 99 0 active sync /dev/sdg3 3 8 115 1 active sync /dev/sdh3 Thanks in advance! Best regards, Wolfgang Denk -- DENX Software Engineering GmbH, Managing Director: Wolfgang Denk HRB 165235 Munich, Office: Kirchenstr.5, D-82194 Groebenzell, Germany Phone: (+49)-8142-66989-10 Fax: (+49)-8142-66989-80 Email: wd@xxxxxxx I am more bored than you could ever possibly be. Go back to work. -- 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