Hi there, my first post..

And a major problem! my raid5 array failed and took 2 GB of data along. Not good!

What happened? - To grow my array from 1 TB to 4.5, I bought a couple of WD 1.5 TB drives and added them one by one as a spare and marked one of the old drives as faulty, so reconstrution kicked in and inserted the new drive to the array. Once that was done for all the new disks, I successfully grew the array to 4.5 GB. Suddenly a disks failed and I replaced it with a new one. Soon later the next disk failed and all in all I had 3 failing drives and decided to switch back to Seagate drives, because I never had trouble with them in this PC. Now I had a raid5 array of 3 drives with no spare and put the new disk in and reconstruction kicked in and BANG! - another of the WDs got troubled: lost page write due to I/O error on md1.

I rebooted my system and no further error regarding the drive comes up in the logs but the array doesn't start. I also tried marking everything as clean using mdadm --run and --force but no success.

I am hoping that the drive had some temporary failur and I might be able to recover my data. Does anyone have an idea what I could try?

I didn't touch it since then, being to afraid to make the final wrong move.

Thx in advance!
((( atom )))