HI,

I've got a RAID5 built of three disks. The server got hard booted and on restart it can't start the array. It says it's kicking non-fresh sdb1. I've been using mdadm to try and assemble the array but it says it can't even if I use resync and run.
It's running on SUSE 9.3. There are four drives but only the last three on on the array.
Is there any way to get that drive fresh again?

Thanks,
Jerry

Are all 4 drives on the array still functional? DId you replace a failed drive?

All drives are still functional. It's just that the server went down and on reboot the drives weren't synched. I've done some futher research on the way I had setup my RAID in hardware and think that might have been the problem. I'm using and onboard Sil3114 controller on a Tyan Tiger K8W. I've read a couple of articles about how this and Linux software RAID don't play well together. Last night I reset the RAID to Ultra and used just software RAID. I then crashed the system a couple of times and it has recovered nicely. I'm thinking the hardware and software RAID's were maybe working against each other.

Thanks for your response.

JW

I'm glad you were able to get it working. Out of curiousity, how did you crash the system intentionally? You might want to try it with data transfers in progress, just to be sure. But only use dummy data for that.