Re: recovery of hosed raid5 array

[Dragan Simic <dsimic@urc.bl.ac.yu>]

On Sun, 12 Oct 2003, dean gaudet wrote:

> querying SMART shouldn't cause this to happen -- but i've seen it occur
> with a promise controller and maxtor disks.  i used to query the SMART
> data once a night just to have a log.  then i switched it to once every 5
> minutes so i could graph the drive temperature... and when i went to once
> every 5 minutes the system became unstable.  the kernel would randomly
> lose the ability to talk to a disk.  the problem would go away after a
> reboot.  i assume it was some sort of race condition.

Just a small drop-in: I have a Promise FastTrak133 with two Maxtor HDDs
attached to it, and running smartmontools every 5 minutes, didn't notice
any troubles or signs of instability.

And, about data recovery, if there are two failing HDDs in a RAID5 array,
and you had nr-spare-disks equal to zero, I *think* there is no chance to
revover your data, because RAID5 is protecting you against at most one
HDD failure.

If I'm wrong, please correct me. ;)


-- 

.----------------------------------------------------------------------------.
| Pozdrav / Best Wishes,     dsimic@urc.bl.ac.yu  | LL   The Choice of       |
| Dragan Simic                 RS.BA Hostmaster   | LL            GNU        |
| URC B.Luka / RSKoming.NET  System/Network Admin | LLLL i n u x  Generation |
`----------------------------------------------------------------------------'

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org
More majordomo info at  http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html