Topic: Raid Problems

[GoldenTomato]

I'm attempting to replace some hard drives that have failed or thrown errors as shown in the picture below.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10152263075922412&l=56ade11188

I've already read the http://wiki.contribs.org/Raid page and I have identified the serial numbers of the various drives.

My questions are:
1.  Should I try to get the devices that are active in md2 to be active in md1?  Or were they inactivated for a reason?
2.  Should I try to replace the three inactive drives at once or one at a time.

I realize the drives should have been replaced as they failed, but I can't go back in time so I have to deal with the situation as presented.

[idp_qbn]

Hi Golden Tomato
From the picture, you have several drives "missing" from their RAID sets. That does not necessarily mean the drives are defective, just that something went wrong with the RAID .
You could try the following:
I had this fragment of advice from years ago on the SME forums but I can't find it there now. Still, here is what I have in my notes - and I have successfully used it more than once:

Rebuild Raid when disk is missing

First step - run "console"Option 5 Manage Disk Redundancy to see if there is an error. (You've done this)

Change the HDA1 or SDA1 to whatever is the missing disk eg on md1, you are missing the first, third, fourth,fifth and sixth drive.
DO this one disk at a time and see if it rebuilds OK.

For bad md1
===========

To add missing IDE drive hda1:
mdadm -a /dev/md1 /dev/hda1

To add missing SATA drive sda1:
mdadm -a /dev/md1 /dev/sda1

For bad md2
===========

To add missing IDE drive hda1:
mdadm -a /dev/md2 /dev/hda2

To add missing SATA drive sda2:
mdadm -a /dev/md2 /dev/sda2



If the disks don't replace properly, or drop out again, you may really need to replace them.
You could  do a SMART test on the disks to see if they report problems - not sure how to do this in Linux.
But I think it may be

Code: [Select]

smartctl -a /dev/sda   (where sda can be changed to whatever disk you want.)

Cheers, best wishes with this .... and good luck. It will be a long, slow process.
Ian

[stephdl]

before to work on raid, it is time to think about your last good backup, you are in a critical issue here.