Hello,

So i am trying to put a filesystem on 7 scsi drives that i have set up in raid 5.
I used fdisk to create partitions on the scsi drives, /dev/sda thru /dev/sdg.
I then run this command to create the raid array.
I am using fedora core 4

mdadm --create --verbose /dev/md0 --level=5 --raid-devices=7 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 /dev/sde1 /dev/sdf1 /dev/sdg1

If i read the man page correctly, then level=5 means i want raid5 and raid-devices=7 means that i have 7 drives.

now after This is finished, i cat /proc/mdstat and i get this.

Personalities : [raid5]
md0 : active raid5 sdg1[7] sdf1[5] sde1[8](F) sdd1[3] sdc1[2] sdb1[1] sda1[0]
860231808 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [7/5] [UUUU_U_]

ok, so now i want to lay a filesystem down on /dev/md0.
I run this command:

mkfs.ext3 /dev/md0

mke2fs 1.37 (21-Mar-2005)
Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
107544576 inodes, 215057952 blocks
10752897 blocks (5.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
Maximum filesystem blocks=218103808
6564 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
16384 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208,
4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616, 78675968,
102400000, 214990848

Writing inode tables: done


However, when this is finished i get the following error.

ext2fs_mkdir: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while creating root dir

So this is were i am stuck, any ideas?

I hope your drives are all identical, or that you quoted the maximum size of the smallest drive.

You see that two of your disks in your raid are "down"

[UUUU_U_]

A raid5 only has 1 parity disk. If more than 1 disk dies or are down the raid are inoperable. You need to reassemble the raid. First check your disks with "badblocks" and smartctl (if that is available for SCSI?).

Use RAID6 if you need 2 disk failsafe. And/or a spare disk.