quoted

However, back to --examine-badblocks. It seems it's reporting the same sector
numbers in the list for several (up to eight) drives. If I understand this
correctly, something strange has hit and damanged all drives on fixed sector
numbers, such as this

Bad-blocks on /dev/sdm:
          436362944 for 128 sectors

It doesn't seem very likely, to be honest, that a lot of drives suddenly damage
the same sector at once. I can see the same occur on a friend's server -
sectors with identical 'bad' sector numbers been listed on individual drives.

It seems very likely the badblocks list is just replicated to new drives. I just
started

# mdadm /dev/md0 --replace /dev/sdb --with /dev/sdk

where sdk is a drive known to be good. It's about halfway through and it's
already copied part of the badblocks list. No I/O errors have been reported in
dmesg or otherwise.

Any idea how to remove this list and start over?

I just tried another approach, mdadm --remove on the spares, mdadm --examine on the removed spares, no superblock. Then madm --fail for one of the drives and mdadm --add for another, now spare for a few milliseconds until recovery started. This runs as it should, slower than --replace, but I don't care. After 12% or so, I checked with --examine-badblocks, and the same sectors are popping up again. This was just a small test to see i --replace was the "bad guy" here or if a full recovery would do the same. It does.

Vennlig hilsen

roy
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Roy Sigurd Karlsbakk
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http://blogg.karlsbakk.net/
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