----- Original Message -----
From: "Andrew Joakimsen"
Solution:
* Reinstall OS on first drive drive (screw this md raid stuff... no --force does not work... obviously md RAID is worthless)
Funny it works great for me and I have run into hairier problems than you described. Involving for instance raid0 arrays with one or more bad drives, raid5 arrays with more than one bad drive, and was able to reasssemble and mount at least well enough to recover data. Sometimes it meant actually destroying and re-creating the raid metadata to mak the payload data _appear_ uncorrupt again, where I just had to realize that some of the data was in fact corrupt or maybe it wasn't, in one case the disk had a physically bad spot, but it was on spot that was actually unused by any files, just it was within an array and within a filesystem, causing both to be broken, but, cloning the disk with dd_rescue onto a new disk that was physically all good, allowed me to re-create a new raid structure and repair the filesystem while managing to preserve the files. I could not have done that purely by the info provided in the man page for mdadm, and no easy magic front-end exists either that I know of (unless you count paying a consultant), but, googling for other peoples experiences, and mostly a lot of experimentation on test disks and test data showed me in more detail what exactly some of the things really mean that are mentioned but not explained in the man pages, and showed me what exactly certain commands & actions would do in certain situations. After *that* I was able to make md raid do not only anything I wanted, but even more than what the expensive and easy to use hardware raid cards can do (except for the one unavoidable particular hardware feature of making an array appear to be a plain disk to the motherboard bios). Rather the opposite of worthless. For starters, it's worth far more than the time & effort it takes to learn how to use it. So, if you don't want to put in that time learning how to use something, then yes indeed you should not use it. Brian K. White brian@aljex.com http://www.myspace.com/KEYofR +++++[>+++[>+++++>+++++++<<-]<-]>>+.>.+++++.+++++++.-.[>+<---]>++. filePro BBx Linux SCO FreeBSD #callahans Satriani Filk! -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org