RAID & HDD failure recovery

[Laurence Vanek]

David -

My experience is identical to yours from steps 1) --> 3). At step 4) my 
experience diverged.

My step 4) went like this:

[4] new drive arrives, I install & attempt to boot, like I had several 
times while waiting for new hdd when failed drive (hda) was powered down.

[4a] Boot hangs, cant find valid partition(s) (i.e. its only looking at 
newly installed drive). For some reason good drive I had been running on 
isnt seen.

[5] Put in rescue disk, but it cant find anything on drive (i.e. looking 
at new drive only). Therefore cant mount sysimage & do anything to 
format the new drive. Need to able to mount the good drive (hdc), the 
other half of the degraded arrays.

[6] Dropped to simple shell with no access to tools like mdadm or 
sfdisk. No way to format the new drive (at least with my level of linux 
skill).

I cant decide if I should file bug against software RAID or whether this 
is expected behavior given what happened. My experience with software 
RAID & Fedora has been excellent in the past.

I recovered by reinstalling FC6, the refuge for those of us with 
insufficient linux skills :-)

Next time I will try knoppix if the drive on the primary controller fails.