I had an issue similar to this years ago where I helped out a former employer on a Dell Poweredge System with a RAID 5 array (Windows). The system Refused to Boot, but there were lights on the front of the backplane were the drives slid in, indicating drive fault (amber) or drive ok (green). One of the tests I did was I re-arranged the drives where they were inserted into the backplane. When I did that the same lights (slots) went amber after re-arranging the drives. The problem wasn't the drives at all, the problem was the controller card going bad. The IT guy that was there full time ended up shipping the drives off to a recovery service depo, and they recovered the data there, no problem. When I worked for Sage we had SCSI RAID Controller cards that had similar functions, where the RAID card config was backed up in the drives, and the Drive configuration was stored in the RAID controller, so they backed up the config of each other. In the event of a failure of the controller card, the same model card could be put back into the system, and the config data pulled off the recovery location in the drives, then the system was back up and going again. Perhaps that is what's happening to your system. I would take several full bare metal backups right now (and test restore the data onto a new system) there may be looming hardware failure around the corner. Chris On 12/16/2020 3:10 PM, Frank Cox wrote: > On Wed, 16 Dec 2020 13:57:13 -0700 > Paul R. Ganci via CentOS wrote: > >> My gut suggests that the raid array was never degraded and that my >> system (i.e. cat /proc/mdstat) was lying to me. Any Opinions? > I wonder if it's a ram failure in either the main computer or the drive controller. An intermittent ram failure (or cold solder joint or something equally hard to track down) could cause all manner of un-repeatable weirdness. > -- Christopher Wensink IS Administrator Five Star Plastics, Inc 1339 Continental Drive Eau Claire, WI 54701 Office: 715-831-1682 Mobile: 715-563-3112 Fax: 715-831-6075 cwensink at five-star-plastics.com www.five-star-plastics.com