[Discuss] Raid 5 Disk Won't Rebuild

[blu at nedharvey.com (Edward Ned Harvey)]

> From: discuss-bounces+blu=nedharvey.com at blu.org [mailto:discuss-
> bounces+blu=nedharvey.com at blu.org] On Behalf Of Chris O'Connell
> 
> I have a 6 disk Raid 5 on a Proliant ML350 G3 running Ubuntu 10.04 32-bit
> and one of the disks failed.  No matter what I do I can't get the
> replacement disk to rebuild.  It comes online, rebuilds for 20 minutes
then
> shuts off.  I've tried downloading the HP Array utilities for Linux and
> running, but they don't help me much.  The firmware for the drive
> controller and BIOS has been updated to the latest version.  I've tried
> four replacement drives, all of them I know are good.

Sounds like a bad backplane, or HBA.


> What's the best utility to back up the whole disk, allowing me to restore
> to a drive (or array) of a different size?  I had considered DD, but I
> don't think I can restore the image if the disk sizes don't match, am I
> wrong?

dd would certainly be easy - but it will waste all sorts of disk space on
the backup destination, and it simply won't work if you try to restore onto
a new device of a different size.

What filesystem are you using?  if it's ext4, then dump -0uaf would be the
most efficient and reliable way to backup the entire filesystem.
Unfortunately, since it includes your OS too...  The restore procedure can
be a pain.  Because dump only backs up the filesystem.  Not the partition
tables or MBR etc.

You should really be able to fix your system, which sounds like a hardware
problem.