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Adam Ryczkowski
Asked: 2012-09-15 01:55:02 +0800 CST

How many really distinct permutations of volumes are in mdadm raid5 degraded array?

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I'm attempting to recover from a failure of my raid volume after upgrade from ubuntu 10.04 to 12.04.

I've tried re-creating the array in any combination of 5 elementary volumes with one replaced with "missing" to ensure that the array wakes as degraded.

Next, with help of dd if=/dev/md1, I made a backup of the first 256kB of each version of my reassembled raid for inspection.

To my astonishment I see only 5 distinct version of the first 256kB chunk out of possible 120 permutations on a 5 disk set or even 24 on a 4 disk set. I assume the 4 disk set number should be correct, because 1 volume must be set as missing and henceforth shouldn't be accounted for.

How can this occur?

linux

1 Answers

  1. The Linux RAID Wiki has a script permute_array.pl designed to go through all the possible permutations and find the "right" one. You should be able to use this to begin recovering your array.

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