FC4 RAID1 DegradedArray event

[George Pappas]

Bruno, your guess was correct.  I downloaded the ISO Seatools from the 
seagate website and booted of a CD.  The drive failed the diagnostics by 
reporting alot of 'bad sectors'.  The utility suggested to format the 
drive using  zero fill method... I am not sure how to do this.. but 
again I havent googled around either.

What was interesting though was when both drives where connected I was 
not able to hot add sda[1..14] to the raid array, but when I physically 
removed sbd and placed sda on sata0 it was able to boot.  Even though it 
booted and recovered some journals it had not synced data for the 
previous 4 days.  Running the utility again revealed that the drive 
still had uncorrectable data errors..thus needing a "Zero fill" format.

I am returning the drive to the vendor as they have the ability to 
replace it for me within 24hours... which suits me just fine,, but it 
would be nice to know how it is possible to format using the above 
mentioned method. Bruno you mentioned dd.. I am not sure what this does.

George





Bruno Wolff III wrote:

>On Thu, Nov 10, 2005 at 10:05:28 +1000,
>  George Pappas <george at mirrabooka.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>/proc/mdstat reveals that the Raid Array has lost the sda drive, this 
>>had occured earlier but only dropped part of the sda drive not all.  I 
>>    
>>
>
>This is normal. Partitions that have problems get dropped.
>
>  
>
>>was able to add the drive back by using mdadm... but 2 days later this 
>>has happened again.  Has anyone else had this problem? or is able to 
>>guide to further diagnosing my situation. 
>>    
>>
>
>My guess is that you had some errors on the disk. Are you using smartd to
>monitor the drives? If not, you should be. You can use smartctl to see
>what the drives have to say for themselves. If there are some bad sectors,
>you will generally need to rewrite them so that the drive can remap them.
>One way to do this is to pull the partition containing the bad sectors out
>of the arrary and use dd to rewrite the bad sector(s) and see if smartctl
>says that things have been cleaned up. Once they have add the partition back
>into the array.
>
>
>
>  
>