Re: Raid 5 - not clean and then a failure.

--- On Tue, 25/8/09, Robin Hill <robin@robinhill.me.uk> wrote:

From: Robin Hill <redacted>
Subject: Re: Raid 5 - not clean and then a failure.
To: linux-raid@vger.kernel.org
Date: Tuesday, 25 August, 2009, 9:16 AM
On Tue Aug 25, 2009 at 12:54:49AM
-0700, Jon Hardcastle wrote:

quoted

Guys,

I have been having some problems with my arrays that I

think i have

quoted

nailed down to a pci controller (well I say that - it

is always the

quoted

drives connected to *a* controller but I have tried

2!) anyway the

quoted

latest saga is i was trying some new kernel options

last night - which

quoted

didn't work.

Did they have the same chipset?  I had problems with
PCI controllers on
one of my systems, which turned out to be some sort of
conflict between
the onboard chipset and the chipset on the
controllers.  I found a PCI
card with a different chipset and have had no issues
since.

quoted

But when i booted up again this morning it said one of

the drives was

quoted

in an inconsistent state (not sure of the *exact*

error message). I

quoted

then kicked off an add of the drive and it started

syncing. It got

quoted

about 5% in and then the second drive in on that

controller complained

quoted

and the array failed.

Is there any hope for my data? If i get a good

controller in there

quoted

will the resync continue? can I try and tell it to

assume the drives

quoted

are good (which they ought to be)?

There's definitely hope.  You can assemble the array
(using the good
drives and the last drive to fail) using the --force
option, then re-add
(and sync) the other drive (I'd recommend doing a fsck on
the filesystem
as well).  I've just had to do a similar thing myself
after two drives
failed (overheated after a fan failure).

Cheers,
    Robin

It worked! I had to force the array, to assemble.. but it did. Had some more problems with the controller that I think was caused ultimately by the two via controller conflicting. I think removing them *both* and booting up helped the computer to work out what was going on (don't know how) I also took down the 'minimum guaranteed' speed of the rebuild to 50MB as the 2 drives on the PCI/150 card were struggling I think - not sure about this as the drive does a 'check' once a week and has only ever failed last weekend. So basically i am not really 100% sure what caused this problem - but i do know i need to get a more stable way of controller these additional drives!

On a side note, if a 'repair' does everything a 'check' does but also repairs it. Is there any merit in just doing repairs?

Finally, anyone here got a port multiplier working?


-----------------------
N: Jon Hardcastle
E: Jon@eHardcastle.com
'Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own.'
-----------------------


      
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