[BlueOnyx:05056] Re: Broken drive

[Stephanie Sullivan]

> -----Original Message-----
> Using a larger replacement drive is fine. In that case some space at
> the end
> of the disk will be unused. However: Make sure to only replace a
> failed disk
> with one that doesn't contain any partitions on it.
> ...
> Michael Stauber

To add to Michael's well spoken point - It's more than just no partitions,
if the drive previously had an IDENTICAL partition layout it will not work
even if the partition table is zeroed. When it's rebuilt the raid data is
still there. Because the partition table is recreated, and the partition
data was not zeroed, the drive will be recognized as part of another raid
set and will NOT auto-heal the raid array.

As I have multiple identical servers with identical hard drives... I learned
this the hard way and it caused some head scratching. I eventually zeroed
out the drive (in place) using dd and then restarted mdchk (I think that was
it, maybe mdstat?) and the rebuild began as I would normally have expected.

I expect a number of us have several identical servers, so this may be an
issue for more than just me. Hope it helps save some others the same
frustrations as I had.

     Thanks,
		-Stephanie