On 09/10/2012 02:52 PM, Todd And Margo Chester wrote:
> On 09/10/2012 10:05 AM, Jeff Siddall wrote:
>> ME software RAID1 is very reliable
>
> Have you had a software RAID failure?  What was the alert?
> And, what did you have to do to repair it?


yes, many times (> 10).  Emails come from mdmonitor (including pending failures).

Only once did the disk controller/kernel get really confused, all other times the system kept on humming along and the user never noticed.  I was able to change the disk at *my* earliest convenience, not when the user is upset about their desktop system being down.

Usually I just swap the drive with a blank and do something like below, of course using care to properly set src and dst.

src=/dev/sda
dst=/dev/sdb
sfdisk --dump ${src} | sfdisk ${dst} # copy partition table
mdadm /dev/md0 -a ${dst}1 # /boot
mdadm /dev/md1 -a ${dst}2 # /boot2
mdadm /dev/md2 -a ${dst}3 # large lvm vg for /, swap, /var, etc.
sleep 5; # let /boot md0 sync
[ $dst = /dev/sdb ] && echo -e "root (hd1,0) \n setup (hd1)" | grub
[ $dst = /dev/sda ] && echo -e "root (hd0,0) \n setup (hd0)" | grub