Software Raid 1 with Slackware 12.0 Possible Failure?
 

I am running Slackware 12.0 and using mdadm for a RAID 1 - 2x 500gb drives (reiserFS). /dev/hda1 and /dev/hdb1 to create /dev/md0


All was working perfectly for months until I was in the middle of configuring GNUmp3d and setting up the index of my music where I got a bunch of stat() errors on dozens of files. This seems to be the start of my problems. I noticed that nearly all files on the drive had question marks ? when I ran 'ls -ltr' to check the permissions, file sizes, etc. because I wasn't sure why I got so many stat errors during indexing. I rebooted the computer many times and now it seems like the drives aren't even being detected. I tried fdisk on /dev/hda, /dev/hdb and /dev/md and they all return 'unable to open' or 'unable to read' (for md).

I then tried fsck.reiserfs /dev/md0 and it gives me these errors:

bread: Cannot read the block (2): (Invalid argument).
reiserfs_open: bread failed reading block 2
bread: Cannot read the block (16): (Invalid argument).
reiserfs_open: bread failed reading block 16

reiserfs_open: the reiserfs superblock cannot be found on /dev/md0.
Failed to open the filesystem.

So I run 'fsck --rebuild-sb /dev/md0'. However, when it asks for the block size, I enter the default 4096 and it exits to the command line for some reason.

Not sure if this is related but also I looked at the output for dmesg and saw this:
Probing IDE interface ide0...
ide0: Wait for ready failed before probe !
I have to check, but I am pretty sure the raid devices were connected to ide0.

Also noticed this in dmesg:
ReiserFS: md0: warning: sh-2006: read_super_block: bread failed (dev md0, block 2, size 4096)
ReiserFS: md0: warning: sh-2006: read_super_block: bread failed (dev md0, block 16, size 4096)
ReiserFS: md0: warning: sh-2021: reiserfs_fill_super: can not find reiserfs on md0

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This might be unrelated but I noticed this in dmesg as well, weird error messages:
kobject_add failed for ehci_hcd with -EEXIST, don't try to register things with the same name in the same directory.
[<c03e86f7>] kobject_shadow_add+0x117/0x1a0
[<c013fba4>] mod_sysfs_setup+0x24/0xb0
[<c0141458>] sys_init_module+0x1648/0x1940
[<c0102ae8>] syscall_call+0x7/0xb
=======================
i2c_core: exports duplicate symbol i2c_smbus_write_i2c_block_data (owned by kernel)
kobject_add failed for uhci_hcd with -EEXIST, don't try to register things with the same name in the same directory.
[<c03e86f7>] kobject_shadow_add+0x117/0x1a0
[<c013fba4>] mod_sysfs_setup+0x24/0xb0
[<c0141458>] sys_init_module+0x1648/0x1940
[<c0102ae8>] syscall_call+0x7/0xb
=======================
kobject_add failed for uhci_hcd with -EEXIST, don't try to register things with the same name in the same directory.
[<c03e86f7>] kobject_shadow_add+0x117/0x1a0
[<c013fba4>] mod_sysfs_setup+0x24/0xb0
[<c0141458>] sys_init_module+0x1648/0x1940
[<c0102ae8>] syscall_call+0x7/0xb
=======================
kobject_add failed for uhci_hcd with -EEXIST, don't try to register things with the same name in the same directory.
[<c03e86f7>] kobject_shadow_add+0x117/0x1a0
[<c013fba4>] mod_sysfs_setup+0x24/0xb0
[<c0141458>] sys_init_module+0x1648/0x1940
[<c0102ae8>] syscall_call+0x7/0xb
=======================

Since it's RAID 1, and since ide0 is complaining, I'm thinking it's your harddrive controller which has gone bad. However, I've read that in IDE, even one disk failure can bring both disks down, which is why in IDE RAID it is better to have the disks on separate controllers if possible. (Probably some speed advantages too..) So... you might have to swap out drives to diagnose the problem and if possible the controller if it is not part of your motherboard.

Looks like it was a dead drive. I took the whole box apart and found out it wasn't even spinning up anymore. Now to figure out how to see data on the remaining single drive... thanks for the help