Raid1 with active and spare partition
- by Daniel Baron
I am having the following problem with a RAID1 software raid partition on my Ubuntu system (10.04 LTS, 2.6.32-24-server in case it matters).
One of my disks (sdb5) reported I/O errors and was therefore marked faulty in the array. The array was then degraded with one active device. Hence, I replaced the harddisk, cloned the partition table and added all new partitions to my raid arrays. After syncing all partitions ended up fine, having 2 active devices - except one of them. The partition which reported the faulty disk before, however, did not include the new partition as an active device but as a spare disk:
md3 : active raid1 sdb5[2] sda5[1]
4881344 blocks [2/1] [_U]
A detailed look reveals:
root@server:~# mdadm --detail /dev/md3
[...]
Number Major Minor RaidDevice State
2 8 21 0 spare rebuilding /dev/sdb5
1 8 5 1 active sync /dev/sda5
So here is the question: How do I tell my raid to turn the spare disk into an active one? And why has it been added as a spare device? Recreating or reassembling the array is not an option, because it is my root partition. And I can not find any hints to that subject in the Software Raid HOWTO.
Any help would be appreciated.
Current Solution
I found a solution to my problem, but I am not sure that this is the actual way to do it. Having a closer look at my raid I found that sdb5 was always listed as a spare device:
mdadm --examine /dev/sdb5
[...]
Number Major Minor RaidDevice State
this 2 8 21 2 spare /dev/sdb5
0 0 0 0 0 removed
1 1 8 5 1 active sync /dev/sda5
2 2 8 21 2 spare /dev/sdb5
so readding the device sdb5 to the array md3 always ended up in adding the device as a spare.
Finally I just recreated the array
mdadm --create /dev/md3 --level=1 -n2 -x0 /dev/sda5 /dev/sdb5
which worked.
But the question remains open for me: Is there a better way to manipulate the summaries in the superblock and to tell the array to turn sdb5 from a spare disk to an active disk? I am still curious for an answer.
