"Eric" == Eric Martin <eric.joshua.martin@gmail.com> writes:
Eric> Now, the main reason for my email. My mythbox / home file Eric> server runs linux soft-raid in RAID5 with 3 500GB disks. One Eric> disk went bad a while ago and the array never rebuilt itself. So you only had two 500Gb disks left in the array? Eric> The other day, the second disk went bad. Am I hosed? Possibly, it depends on how bad the second disk is. What I would do is try to use dd_rescue to copy the 2nd bad disk onto a new disk (possibly your original bad disk if you feel brave!) and then try to re-assemble your raid 5 using that. You might or might not have corruption in the filesystem, so make sure you run an fsck on it. Now, in the future, you should run a weekly check of the array for bad blocks or other problems, so that you get notified if a disk dies silently. I use the following crontab entry: # # cron.d/mdadm -- schedules periodic redundancy checks of MD devices # # Copyright © martin f. krafft <madduck@madduck.net> # distributed under the terms of the Artistic Licence 2.0 # # By default, run at 00:57 on every Sunday, but do nothing unless the day of # the month is less than or equal to 7. Thus, only run on the first Sunday of # each month. crontab(5) sucks, unfortunately, in this regard; therefore this # hack (see #380425). 57 0 * * 0 root if [ -x /usr/share/mdadm/checkarray ] && [ $(date +\%d) -le 7 ]; then /usr/share/mdadm/checkarray --cron --all --idle --quiet; fi and I get a nice weekly report on both arrays on my main filerserver at thome. Eric> I've been googling for 'rebuild bad linux software raid' but all Eric> I get is the rebuild command. Also, I don't see any tools that Eric> will move bad data to another spot on the disk. This is my Eric> first time using software raid so I'm in a bit over my head. The first thing is to ask for help on the linux-raid mailing list, which is hosted on vger.kernel.org. But somethings you can do to help is to give us more information. Like: cat /proc/mdstat mdadm -E /dev/sd... or /dev/hd... depending on whether your SATA or IDE drives. Basically, use the devices you got from the /proc/mdstat output as your basis. Give us this output, and we should be able to help you more. John