[NBLUG/talk] I feel dirty and degraded.... Software Raid Recovery

Kyle Rankin kyle at nblug.org
Sat Nov 11 12:21:23 PST 2006


On Sat, Nov 11, 2006 at 09:01:21AM -0800, Mark Street wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I have a Fedora Core 4 box with 4 SCSI disks on an LSI controller running 
> Software RAID 5.
> 
> The machine lost drive 2 and I was not able to login to shut it down properly.
> 
> I removed the failed drive and tried to boot the machine on the 3 remaining 
> drives...  grub came up and the machine would start to boot but it would get 
> to the point of mounting the array and would complain about the array being 
> dirty and degraded and fail to mount ext3 partitions... instant kernel panic.
> 
> I aquired my new drive and booted the machine with Knoppix 5.  I can see all 
> of my drives and their partitions (3) each for the existing drives in the 
> array, the new drive has no partitions.  Does anyone have sage advice on 
> re-assembling this dirty and degraded array?  I have the mdadm command on 
> Knoppix.
> 
> mdadm --assemble /dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=3 missing /dev/sdb
> 
> ??  Then add the new drive once I can clean up the original existing drives 
> with an mdadm /dev/md0 -a /dev/sda2?
> 
> TIA
> -- 
> Mark Street, D.C., RHCE
> CTO Alliance Medical Center
> http://www.oswizards.com
> http://www.alliancemed.org
> --
> "First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you 
> win" - Gandhi
> "If you want truly to understand something, try to change it" - Kurt Lewin
> --
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> 

That more or less looks right to me. Honestly it's strange that the machine
wouldn't boot with the loss of just one drive, RAID5 should be resilient
against that sort of thing. Maybe try booting again and jot down the exact
errors you are seeing? Perhaps you lost more than one drive.

-- 
Kyle Rankin
NBLUG President
The North Bay Linux Users Group
http://nblug.org
IRC: greenfly at irc.freenode.net #nblug 
kyle at nblug.org



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