This morning, I thought that my server had hung and, in a fit of frustration, I recycled the power. - Not clever, I know! My problems turned out to be that my network switch had given up the ghost.
The server restarted and promptly tried to rebuild the RAID (2x250GB IDE drives in a software RAID).
As expected, I received the following in an email:-
"This is an automatically generated mail message from mdadm running on server1.mydomain.com.
A RebuildFinished event has been detected on md device /dev/md2."
This was promptly followed by:-
"This is an automatically generated mail message from mdadm running on server1.mydomain.com.
A Fail event has been detected on md device /dev/md2."
I logged into the server and executed the following:-
[root@server1 ~]# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1]
md2 : active raid1 hdb2[1]
244091520 blocks [2/1] [_U]
md1 : active raid1 hda1[0] hdb1[1]
104320 blocks [2/2] [UU]
unused devices: <none>
[root@server1 ~]# fdisk -lu /dev/hda; fdisk -lu /dev/hdb
Disk /dev/hda: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders, total 488397168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hda1 * 63 208844 104391 fd Linux raid autodetect
/dev/hda2 208845 488392064 244091610 fd Linux raid autodetect
Disk /dev/hdb: 250.0 GB, 250059350016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 30401 cylinders, total 488397168 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/hdb1 * 1 208769 104384+ fd Linux raid autodetect
Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary.
/dev/hdb2 208770 488392063 244091647 fd Linux raid autodetect
[root@server1 ~]# mdadm --manage /dev/md2 --add /dev/hda2
mdadm: hot added /dev/hda2
The RAID then started to resync.
Now I am starting to wonder whether I have done the right thing. - All services are working, but the RAID is being rebuilt from a drive which may have a wonky partition.
Can anybody offer and advice or suggestions?