Mdadm troubles

[MrSmoke]

So at this point im an extremely worried about my array as i need them 4TB of data on it.

So here's the story:

Server was running all good but the memory usage was high from a memory leak in java. So i restarted the server. One of the hard drives decided to change drive letters so i had to re-add it to the raid5 array and rebuild it. All good. Log into the server again and it says one of the other drives in the array has been dropped. Odd? SMART says its fine and its still in linux working fine. Array goes down as it now has 2 dropped drives. Im not sure if it finished rebuilding or not as i wasnt really keeping an eye on it for 30hours.

So now i have a RAID5 array with 2 removed drives and 2 spare drives that is for some reason saying it is the wrong size and wont rebuild.

Details:

MDADM RAID5 with an LVM ontop on it.

RAID5 consists of 4 1.5tb drives. = 4.5TB

For some reason it is reporting as 5.76TB or so and i dont know why.

mdadm.conf:

RAY /dev/md1 level=raid5 num-devices=4 metadata=00.90 UUID=44fc3622:cf99fe69:5d53fc14:f3cbdc1c devices=/dev/sde1,/dev/sdg1,/dev/sdh1,/dev/sdi1

(i changed it to match the correct drive letter and rebooted the server but still no dice.


/etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf
RRAY /dev/md1 level=raid5 num-devices=4 UUID=44fc3622:cf99fe69:5d53fc14:f3cbdc1c


All drives are working and none of them are faulty.

Please help

 

[john4200]

I suggest asking on the linux-RAID email list:

http://vger.kernel.org/vger-lists.html#linux-raid

There are a lot of mdadm experts there, including the developer, Neil Brown.

Also, in the future I suggest specifying the drives in a way that does not change. I usually use /dev/disk/by-id/____ entries in mdadm.conf.

 

[drescherjm]

I suggest specifying the drives in a way that does not change.

One other way is to be more lax on the devices. I mean mdadm will find the correct disks out of dozens so I add lines like

DEVICES=/dev/sd[abcdefhgijklmn]1

along with ARRAY lines and mdadm always reassembles correctly..


At this point I second John's advice. That is probably the best place to go. I believe you will have to force the assembly manually instead of automatic reassembly. But go ask the experts first..