Mark Schoonover wrote:
Barry L. Kline mailto:blkline@attglobal.net tapped at Friday, May 26, 2006 2:56 PM:
I'd like to know how things went with software raid when you've lost a drive in a mirror or RAID5. The times that's happened to me, I could never recover the partition - had to always restore from tape. After that point, it was hardware only. Software RAID works fine, as long as there's no problems.
I have lost a drive in a mirror and had no trouble recovering it. The steps are basically the same for a RAID 5 system as they are for the mirror.
What I figured out early on was that I didn't want to be discovering how RAID recovery works while under the gun to get a failed drive replaced. I tried that once and found it extremely stressful.
What you might want to do (assuming that you have an old PC and a couple of old drives around) is build a test system that you can experiment with. I did that and now have a good working knowledge of the recovery steps. ('tho I took good notes because the frequence of this occuring has been, for me, rather low). Failed drive in another machine? BRING IT ON! (okay, okay... I don't want to tempt the gods and *really* have that failure, but I'm not as concerned about it as I once was).
Barry