Topic: degraded raid 5 array

[jameswilson]

Hi all.
Have a little problem caused by stupid me.
Basically have a 4400 x2 with 5 x 500Gb seagate sata's in it.
These have individual hard disk coolers. IN moving this server (its my home storage server, media etc) i unplugged the fans for a bit to check temps, in doing so i disconnected a drive. As the system had a hat spare it rebuilt and i thought nothing of it knowing id plug it back in soon.
Well today i did. It said it now had an used drive to be added... did i want to etc, i said yes.

Now i have a degraded array with a funny hd setup.

I definetly have 5 hard drives but the system (fdisk -l) lists only 4

but anyway.


any suggestions. I have tried adding sdc2 into the array but i get

[root@bigdrive ~]# mdadm /dev/md2 -a /dev/sdc2
mdadm: ARRAY line /dev/md2 has no identity information.
mdadm: ARRAY line /dev/md1 has no identity information.
mdadm: Cannot open /dev/sdc2: Device or resource busy

thanks

[sal1504]

james

I had a similiar problem and found this in the How To's  - http://wiki.contribs.org/Raid. I followed the instructions and it resolved my raid problem. Go to the section that is titled  Resynchronising a Failed RAID. Hope it works for you.

Sal

[jameswilson]

unfortunatly not but i have been trying

dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=1M

to wipe the hard disk and am hoping that will allow it back into the array...

fingers crossed as that command on a 500 Gb hard disk seems to take a while!

[jameswilson]

nope unfortunatly that hasnt done it, any ideas guys?

[jameswilson]

i manually added sdc to the md2 array, but i still have an array problem on md1, i assume i need to create some sort of partition?

ill add all these drives are identical. But im still missing a drive, i have checked all the drives are powered and have sata, and im only showing sda - sdd, no sde?