On Tue, 11 May 2010 12:07:08 +0530 Does this extra "md_d99" appear when you create the array, or only when you assemble it, or only after reboot? What does ls -l /dev/md* This sounds like the array is being assembled by udev issuing mdadm -I devname commands, the somehow "mdadm -I" is getting confused about whether to create a partitioned array or not (/dev/md99 cannot have partitions, /dev/md_d99 can). Maybe try: mdadm -Ss mdadm -Ivv /dev/sda mdadm -Ivv /dev/sdb mdadm ...

Ta for those who sent along some tips... In the end, I did manage to persuade the controller to put the array back together (succeeded on the second attempt, after restoring the drive metadata from the backups I'd taken). Part of the reason that I didn't try this originally is that I didn't have access to any spare SCSI/SCA drives, or the original RAID controller either! Once I had access to the original block device, I created a COW snapshot in order to run fsck.ext3 on the ...

I have a 5-disk raid5 array which I recently reshaped to raid6 while simultaneously adding a 6th disk. mdadm (3.1.1) reported that the kernel I was running at the time (2.6.30) wasn't safe to perform the in-place portion of the reshaping. The array was partitionally converted to raid6, but I believe the Q blocks are all on the last device I added. mdadm seems to report the algorithm as left-symmetric-6 as opposed to left-symmetric. Today I upgraded to 2.6.32 and mdadm 3.1.2 and ...