Disc failure on a software RAID system has killed everything

[Bryn M. Reeves]

On 05/19/2010 12:13 PM, Bryn M. Reeves wrote:
> On 05/19/2010 12:04 PM, Gary Stainburn wrote:
>> Hi folks,
>>
>> I've got a PC with 5x500GB HDD's running software raid.  On drive 0 and 1 I 
>> had RAID0 for the boot partition and then on all 5 drives I had RAID 5 for 
>> everything else.
> 
> Why use RAID0 for the boot partition? That means that a failure of
> either drive will make the system unbootable (since half the file system
> needed for booting is on the dead device).
> 
> I tend to use RAID1 for boot devices, RAID5 for general storage (where I
> either don't care too much about write performance or expect a low level
> of write I/O). I would only use RAID0 for transient data that can be
> easily regenerated after a hardware failure (or combine it with RAID1 if
> you need to combine redundancy with better write performance but make
> sure you understand the way that different stackings behave[1]).

Oops, forgot to include the link:

[1] http://www.aput.net/~jheiss/raid10/

>> One of the first two drives has died causing the PC to hang, and then when I 
>> rebooted it couldn't get past GRUB.  I have found out which drive it is and 
>> disconnected it. It then got past GRUB, loaded the kernel which then paniced 
>> and hung.

It might help to post the panic text (or at least a description) but to
be honest I think you'll likely need to rebuild your /boot file system
from scratch and re-install grub to get this working again.

Regards,
Bryn.