<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 9/24/07, <b class="gmail_sendername"><a href="mailto:f-myth-users@media.mit.edu">f-myth-users@media.mit.edu</a></b> <<a href="mailto:f-myth-users@media.mit.edu">f-myth-users@media.mit.edu
</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> > Date: Fri, 21 Sep 2007 23:47:21 -0700<br> > From: "Steve MacLaren" <
<a href="mailto:scram69@gmail.com">scram69@gmail.com</a>><br><br> > On 9/21/07, Steve MacLaren <<a href="mailto:scram69@gmail.com">scram69@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br> > > But it looks like I will just have to ignore the obvious contradictions
<br> > > and forge ahead trying to mount and access a 3-drive array by messing with<br> > > /sys/block/md0/md/array_state, then wiping and re-adding the fourth drive...<br><br> > Finally, some good news. Before I went ahead picking 3 disks at random and
<br> > assembling, I re-read through all of the posts on this thread. The one that<br> > caught my eye was in f-myth's PPS:<br> > "for each drive, try dd if=/dev/sdaN of=/dev/null bs=1M count=1000 and see
<br> > if you can read the first gig of the device"<br><br> > I hadn't yet tried that, so I gave it a try. Sure enough, /dev/sdd1 cause a<br> > reboot when I tried the read. Not being hardware-savvy enough to know which
<br> > of my physical drives was _actually_ /dev/sdd, I ran through a process of<br> > elimination, removing power to one drive at a time until I could<br> > successfully read from the three remaining drives.
<br> > Identifying the bad drive, I yanked it, replaced it with a brand new spare I<br> > had fortuitously purchased some months ago, and restarted.<br> > Upon restart, in dmesg, mdadm gave the same complaints about "dirty" drives
<br> > and the array status remained inactive. But I tried<br> > mdadm -S /dev/md0<br> > mdadm -Af /dev/md0 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1<br> > "mdadm: /dev/md0 has been started with 3 drives (out of 4)." - hey, that
<br> > looks good!<br><br>Aha!<br><br>You're welcome. :)<br><br>(I would have tried that before the new power supply, but you can<br>probably return the one you bought if you feel want to go back to<br>the old one. Otherwise, you now have a fast-swap spare.
</blockquote><div><br>I went kinda cheap ($25) on the original PSU and have always had a nagging feeling it might be a weak link, so I don't feel so bad about replacing it with a beefier one - and like you say, it's never a bad idea to have a working spare lying around.
<br><br>Anyway, thanks again for your help. Samsung just sent me an RMA# for the drive. Don't know how I would have figured this mess out without the help from this board-<br></div><br></div>