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From: Thomas Tootle on 14 Apr 2010 06:37
Greetings,
I'm running a media server with 4 identical Seagate 250 Gb hard drives.
sda is the boot and has the openSUSE 11.2, the other 3 are configured in
RAID5. I'm getting an error message that sdb is unavailable but
otherwise the box runs fine and I have access to all my files. Can I
just pull sdb, install a new harddrive and expect to automagically
incorporate it into my RAID5? If not, what steps should I take.

Thanks,
T
From: David Bolt on 14 Apr 2010 07:27
On Wednesday 14 Apr 2010 11:37, while playing with a tin of spray paint,
Thomas Tootle painted this mural:

> Greetings,
> I'm running a media server with 4 identical Seagate 250 Gb hard drives.
> sda is the boot and has the openSUSE 11.2, the other 3 are configured in
> RAID5.

Hardware or software RAID?

> I'm getting an error message that sdb is unavailable but
> otherwise the box runs fine and I have access to all my files.

You will have, up until another drive fails.

Do you know why the drive it missing? Have you checked the SMART
diagnostics to see? Having SMART do a long test of the drive performs a
surface scan and should tell you if it's failed due to (a) bad
sector(s). It might be possible to recover the bad sector and/or force
the drive to reallocate one of the spare sectors, although you're going
to have to find it first.

> Can I
> just pull sdb, install a new harddrive and expect to automagically
> incorporate it into my RAID5?

That depends. If it's a software RAID, you'll need to partition the
drive and then add it to the array. If it's a hardware RAID, you'll
probably just need to add it to the controller and tell that to add the
drive to the array.

> If not, what steps should I take.

For software RAID, you'll need to remove the old drive from the array,
make a partition[0], set the partition ID to be Linux RAID (FD) and
then add it to the array. If you're happy with the command line, the
second and third steps can be done together using fdisk, while the
first and last two can be done using mdadm.

The HOWTO for Linux RAID is here:

<https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Linux_Raid>

and you can use the info from here:

<https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Detecting,_querying_and_testing>

to know what mdadm commands to use to remove and replace the faulty
drive.


[0] you may need to make the partition the same size as the ones on the
other drives, or you might not. I've not yet built a RAID5 array so
can't say.

Regards,
David Bolt

--
Team Acorn: www.distributed.net OGR-NG @ ~100Mnodes RC5-72 @ ~1Mkeys/s
openSUSE 11.0 32b | | | openSUSE 11.3M4 32b
openSUSE 11.0 64b | openSUSE 11.1 64b | openSUSE 11.2 64b |
TOS 4.02 | openSUSE 11.1 PPC | RISC OS 4.02 | RISC OS 3.11

From: Thomas Tootle on 15 Apr 2010 05:35
David Bolt wrote:
> On Wednesday 14 Apr 2010 11:37, while playing with a tin of spray paint,
> Thomas Tootle painted this mural:
>
>> Greetings,
>> I'm running a media server with 4 identical Seagate 250 Gb hard drives.
>> sda is the boot and has the openSUSE 11.2, the other 3 are configured in
>> RAID5.
>
> Hardware or software RAID?
>
>> I'm getting an error message that sdb is unavailable but
>> otherwise the box runs fine and I have access to all my files.
>
> You will have, up until another drive fails.
>
> Do you know why the drive it missing? Have you checked the SMART
> diagnostics to see? Having SMART do a long test of the drive performs a
> surface scan and should tell you if it's failed due to (a) bad
> sector(s). It might be possible to recover the bad sector and/or force
> the drive to reallocate one of the spare sectors, although you're going
> to have to find it first.
>
>> Can I
>> just pull sdb, install a new harddrive and expect to automagically
>> incorporate it into my RAID5?
>
> That depends. If it's a software RAID, you'll need to partition the
> drive and then add it to the array. If it's a hardware RAID, you'll
> probably just need to add it to the controller and tell that to add the
> drive to the array.
>
>> If not, what steps should I take.
>
> For software RAID, you'll need to remove the old drive from the array,
> make a partition[0], set the partition ID to be Linux RAID (FD) and
> then add it to the array. If you're happy with the command line, the
> second and third steps can be done together using fdisk, while the
> first and last two can be done using mdadm.
>
> The HOWTO for Linux RAID is here:
>
> <https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Linux_Raid>
>
> and you can use the info from here:
>
> <https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Detecting,_querying_and_testing>
>
> to know what mdadm commands to use to remove and replace the faulty
> drive.
>
>
> [0] you may need to make the partition the same size as the ones on the
> other drives, or you might not. I've not yet built a RAID5 array so
> can't say.
>
> Regards,
> David Bolt
>
Thanks David,
This is a software RAID. I've got time this weekend to start to delve
into it. Shortsighted of me but SMART isn't enabled in the BIOS. I use
both the GUI and command line though for RAID5 in openSUSE I've always
set them up with the partition manager in YAST with no difficulties to
date. Fortunately there isn't anything on this RAID5 I haven't backed up
elsewhere. Worst case will be if frakking around (without really knowing
what I'm doing) I'll lose the old stuff and be compelled to set up RAID5
again. I appreciate the pointers.

Tom
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