RAID5 drive failure, please verify my commands

Gerd Knops Sun, 16 Jan 2005 10:15:07 -0800

Hello all,

One of the dreaded Maxtor SATA drives in my RAID5 failed, after just 3 months of light use. Anyhow I neither have the disk capacity nor the money to buy it to make a backup. To make sure I do it correctly, could you folks please double-check my intended course of action? I would really appreciate that.

Current state:

xanadu:~# uname -a
Linux xanadu 2.6.8-1-386 #1 Mon Sep 13 23:29:55 EDT 2004 i686 GNU/Linux
xanadu:~# mdadm --detail /dev/md0
/dev/md0:
        Version : 00.90.01
  Creation Time : Fri Oct  8 13:01:49 2004
     Raid Level : raid5
     Array Size : 490223104 (467.51 GiB 501.99 GB)
    Device Size : 245111552 (233.76 GiB 250.99 GB)
   Raid Devices : 3
  Total Devices : 3
Preferred Minor : 0
    Persistence : Superblock is persistent

    Update Time : Sun Jan 16 06:25:31 2005
          State : clean, degraded
 Active Devices : 2
Working Devices : 2
 Failed Devices : 1
  Spare Devices : 0

         Layout : left-symmetric
     Chunk Size : 256K

           UUID : 0c758197:f3af8f3b:d68050c0:04ea429e
         Events : 0.221727

    Number   Major   Minor   RaidDevice State
       0       0        0        -      removed
       1       8       17        1      active sync   /dev/sdb1
       2       8       33        2      active sync   /dev/sdc1

       3       8        1        -      faulty   /dev/sda1


Here is what I think I should be doing:

- Remove failed disk from array:

        mdadm /dev/md0 --remove /dev/sda1

- Physically remove disk from system
- Add new disk to system, partition
- Add to array:

        mdadm /dev/md0 --add /dev/sda1

Anything else to trigger rebuilding of the disk?

That should be it, correct? Also since I lost all confidence in the Maxtor drives (had a long history of problems with that brand, I don't think any Maxtor drive I ever owned made it to retirement) I probably will buy a new drive immediately and replace the broken one. Then when the broken one is repaired/exchanged, I would like to add it as spare. To do so, would the sequence be

        mdadm /dev/md0 --add /dev/sdd1

Is that it?

Also one last question: Foolishly I allocated all available space in the Maxtors for the RAID. Now, should the replacement drive have a slightly smaller capacity, is there some way to deal with that? I think i can use resize2fs to reduce the size of the filesystem (does this work with ext3 file systems?). Assuming that works, is there some way to convince the RAID to accept a smaller partition and adjust it's size accordingly?

Thanks all

Gerd

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RAID5 drive failure, please verify my commands

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