Hi, I've been spending the afternoon upgrading my home server and I'm having an issue with creating a RAID5 array to hold the data. Note that the OS is running on another disk and is not included on the RAID5 array and that I am using Software Raid under 10.3. To go into the RAID5 array I have six 500GB disks. Each of these has a single Linux Raid unformatted primary partition; sda1, sdb1, sdd1, sde1, sdf1 and sdg1. When I go to create the array md0 it does not give any errors but when I list the detail on the array afterwards it says that it is in a degraded state with only 5 disks in use and 1 disk as spare instead of all 6 in use. I have tried creating the array with the Yast2 GUI, (on the running system not during the install process), and from the command line using: mdadm -C /dev/md0 -v -n 6 -c 4096 -l 5 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdd1 /dev/sde1 /dev/sdf1 /dev/sdg1 with the same result. It also seems that the disk which is set to spare is the last one given so if I reorder the disks and add /dev/sde1 last then that will become the spare instead of /dev/sdg1, (which seems to indicate that it isn't an issue with one particular disk). What I see when I look at the array is as follows: orb:/etc # mdadm --detail --scan -vvv /dev/md0: Version : 00.90.03 Creation Time : Sun Dec 2 17:27:38 2007 Raid Level : raid5 Array Size : 2441912320 (2328.79 GiB 2500.52 GB) Used Dev Size : 488382464 (465.76 GiB 500.10 GB) Raid Devices : 6 Total Devices : 6 Preferred Minor : 0 Persistence : Superblock is persistent Update Time : Sun Dec 2 17:27:38 2007 State : clean, degraded Active Devices : 5 Working Devices : 6 Failed Devices : 0 Spare Devices : 1 Layout : left-symmetric Chunk Size : 4096K UUID : 837eecb4:28f004fb:0e4f8c91:f584a4b1 Events : 0.1 Number Major Minor RaidDevice State 0 8 1 0 active sync /dev/sda1 1 8 17 1 active sync /dev/sdb1 2 8 49 2 active sync /dev/sdd1 3 8 65 3 active sync /dev/sde1 4 8 81 4 active sync /dev/sdf1 5 0 0 5 removed 6 8 97 - spare /dev/sdg1 Previously I had an array of four 200GB disks and all four showed as active sync so that is what I was expecting here too and I was expecting to have an array size ~3TB with ~2.5TB usable. All disks have been checked with the Samsung diagnostic tool and show to be clear from hardware errors. Does anybody know anything about this who could throw some light on why this is occurring and what I can do to correct it? Many Thanks Tim -- Tim Hempstead thempstead@gmail.com -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org