[CentOS] Centos and Software RAID

Fri May 26 23:48:27 UTC 2006
Barry L. Kline <blkline at attglobal.net>

Mark Schoonover wrote:
> Barry L. Kline <mailto:blkline at 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