I experienced a similar problem. Using raid5 on 4 drives and LVM+ext3. After manually overriding the arrays state
Code:
echo "clean" > /sys/block/md0/md/array_state
I checked the events on all disks and the array itself
Code:
[root@juno ~]# mdadm --examine /dev/hd[bdfh]1 | grep Event
Events : 0.87645
Events : 0.87645
Events : 0.87644
Events : 0.87462
[root@juno ~]# mdadm --detail /dev/md0
/dev/md0:
Version : 00.90.03
Creation Time : Sat Nov 4 02:38:57 2006
Raid Level : raid5
Device Size : 156288256 (149.05 GiB 160.04 GB)
Raid Devices : 4
Total Devices : 3
Preferred Minor : 0
Persistence : Superblock is persistent
Update Time : Sun Dec 24 07:31:10 2006
State : active, degraded
Active Devices : 3
Working Devices : 3
Failed Devices : 0
Spare Devices : 0
Layout : left-symmetric
Chunk Size : 64K
UUID : 916d12f4:0df2cd68:594a1080:6da31000
Events : 0.87645
Number Major Minor RaidDevice State
0 3 65 0 active sync /dev/hdb1
1 22 65 1 active sync /dev/hdd1
2 33 65 2 active sync /dev/hdf1
0 0 0 0 removed
As you all know I need n-1 good drives in a RAID5 array to recover the data. In this case I need three. But I only have two according to the events.
So I took the three best, i.e. those three closest to the value of the md array itself. Using the same technique described above, I was able to recover all my data. Phew!
