Re: Bizarre RAID "failure"

I don't know if this till help, but I was having lots of trouble with my promise controllers until 2.4.23... before that, they were locking up drives all the time.  I had one drop out entirely, with two drives.  I had to rebuild a raid5 with two dead drives.

Once I upgraded, I stopped having such trouble.

One more thing I might add, I too had 3 promise controllers and that was hard to manage as well.  I moved two drives to my onboard controller which not only made things a bit less flaky (I am assuming 33% less flaky) but also seemed to speed things up (later VIA chipsets take the HDD controller off of the PCI bus, and three PCI HDD controllers can easily saturate that.)

On Thursday 19 February 2004 02:44 pm, Tom Maddox wrote:

Hi, all,

I'm encountering a bizarre problem with software RAID 5 under Linux that
I'm hoping someone on this list can help me solve or at least
understand.

I've got a box running Red Hat 7.3 with SGI's 2.4.18 XFS 1.1 kernel. 
It's using three FastTrak TX 2000 (PDC20271) cards in non-RAID mode with
three Western Digital 200 GB drives.  I'm using those controllers
because they were handy and they support large drives.  The drives are
in an XFS-formatted RAID 5 array using md, which has never given me
problems before.  In this case, however, I'm running into some seriously
anomalous behavior.

If the system goes down unexpectedly (e.g., because of a power failure),
the RAID array comes back up dirty and begins to rebuild itself, which
is odd enough on its own.  What's worse is that, whenever this happens,
the rebuild hangs at about 2.4%.  When it reaches that point, the array
becomes totally nonresponsive--I can't even query its status with mdadm
or any other tool, although I can use "cat /proc/mdstat" to see the
status of the rebuild.  Any command that attempts to access the RAID
drive hangs.

My assumption would normally be that there's a hardware failure
somewhere, but I've swapped out each component individually (including
cables!) and the same problem keeps happening.

Has anyone seen this behavior before, and can you recommend a solution?

Thanks,

Tom

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html