Possible failure & recovery
From: Daniel L. Miller <hidden>
Date: 2009-08-10 18:08:00
I'm not 100% certain about this...but maybe. I had setup a small box as a remote backup for our company. I THOUGHT I had set it up as a Raid-10 - but I can't swear to it now. I just had a need to try to recover a file from that backup - only to find we just had an error. Checking mdadm.conf, I find - ARRAY /dev/.static/dev/md0 level=raid10 num-devices=4 devices=/dev/sda,/dev/sdb,/dev/sdc,/dev/sdd UUID=7ec24ccc:973f5065:a79315d0:449291b3 auto=part Now, I do know that one of the drives had failed previously (sdd), and the array has been operating in degraded condition for some time. Now it appears that a second drive failed. I received XFS errors and only two drives showed under /proc/mdstat (sdb was removed as well as sdd). xfs_check reported errors. Whether or not it was a good idea, I tried adding sdb back to the array. It worked and started rebuilding. Then I noticed that the array was reporting as "raid6". I don't know when it BECAME raid6, if I always had it as such or if the raid-10 somehow degraded and became raid-6. If it actually did so - that might make for some type of a migration/expansion path for a raid-10 array that needs to grow. My xfs_repair -L /dev/md0 process is currently running...I'm holding my breath to see how much I get back... -- Daniel