Benoit, Thanks for the reply. > Did your problems happen while auto-synchronisation is in process. If yes, > try to let if terminate and try to recreate your fs. I am creating this array in degraded mode by uding the failed-disk option. So no synchronisation is attempted. > First of all : why don't you use autodetection ? I will, when the array is functioning, but as I have experienced persistent filesystem corruption so far, sometimes so bad that it effectively halts the bootup process, I do not want the raid to start until I tell it to, and certainly not towards the start of the boot process. > Little geometry problem I think. Try to force the geometry of hda to be the > same as the geometry of hdc, hde, hdg. hda5 has not the same size as the > other partitions of the RAID array. I'll not be very surprised if your > problem start from here. > Try to pass the following parameters to the kernel : > "hda=76428,16,63" > then use fdisk to recreate your partition table I also think the most likely problem is disk geometry, but probably no on hda, as that disk is failed, and therefore not a part of the array at the moment. My candidates for suspicion are either hdc, because its logical geometry does not match its physical geometry as recognised by linux, neither of which match the geometry selected by the BIOS, or hde and hdg, because a cylinder count of 76428 is higher than that currently allowed by linux. My dilemma is that each disk seems to work fine on its own, just not as part of an array. I have tried passing geomtries as parameters previously, bu never found a combination that made a difference. This problem is not made simpler by the fact that I cannot get at the BIOS of the Promise controllers to adjust the geometries of hde and hdg. > You could try to suppress hda5, suppress hda3 and to recreate a real > partition on hda3 (Don't create an extended partition). Use the type 83, or > fd for autodetection. I would also prefer to use hda3, but unfortunately verions of Mandrake before 8.0 (my previous install was 7.2) insisted on installing to hda5. As I have well over 30Gb (mainly MP3s) on hda5, I would prefer not to wipe it out and reinstall. The previous restore from backup took over 24 hours! Although untidy, this should not make any difference, particularly at the moment with hda out of the array. I have allowed myself the potential to tidy this up by specifying hda3 rather than hda5 as the failed-disk. > Are your 4 drives identical (same model number, same brand and so on) ? Yes. Not that it should matter. Thanks for the thoughts, but I don't think any of this hits the spot. Cheers, Bruno Prior - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
