Topic: Question about Raid 5 with spare

[tviles]

Recently had the spare drive go bad in a 6 drive scsi system. I replaced the spare with same size 73gb drive. I partitioned it and did a format ext3 so it is back to being sdf1 drive. Question is do I need to do more to it? Or does the spare just sit there doing nothing until one of the raid 5 disks goes down. Does it need to be mounted to anything? Thanks T

[tviles]

So you largest raid hard drive cannot be should not be larger than your spare?
Correct? Say I buy a 146gb drive but my spare is a 73gb drive. That would be a problem with the 146 gb drive failed?

[tviles]

After reading all the howto's I can find on this I'm still guessing. I did try to pull out the first drive in a raid5 server and insert larger drive. Server will not boot. Tried pulling out second drive and replacing with larger drive. System goes into degraded raid array. Does not show up in Server-Manager as syncing. Even did the get rid of mbr thing. Going to try this again soon but will catch drive first in system bios and do a low level format to this scsi drive. Then after system boots up it will probably be in degraded array again. Will try to partition this drive and format to ext3 then go from there. Either reboot or try to add into array. I did note that when adding drive back into raid array logged in as root using md commands it quickly prompts back cannot add into array, but it you issue su admin and then go into manage disk in the server-manager it tells you resyncing drives. Too many different setups and too many different servers models and makes out there for someone to write the perfect howto doc for everyone to use. But that is the fun in Linux I guess.