Re-assembling the RAID-5 array reboots my CentOS-5 machine

Question

I have 3 HDD's, each divided into 3 partitions.

I had created a RAID-1 for boot partition

• md0 created from sda0, sdb0

and had also created two RAID-5 arrays:

• md1 created from sda1, sdb1, sdc1
• md2 created from sda2, sdb2, sdc2

It used to work fine but one day I had to power off the machine (cold reboot) to get any response from the machine. After that, when the system started booting, it tried for a while to reconstruct the RAID arrays but after a few minutes it crashed silently.

I booted the system in linux rescue mode from the DVD and tried to re-assemble the RAID devices manually. I was able to re-assemble md0 and md1 using:

mdadm --assemble --scan /dev/md0

mdadm --assemble --scan /dev/md1

But when I try to re-assemble md2 using:

mdadm --assemble --scan /dev/md2

the system reboots silently again.

How can I fix this problem?

Answer 1

I was suspecting that it's a hardware issue but the problem was the old kernel used in CentOS5. I used Ubuntu 10.10 32bit edition live CD and was able to reconstruct the array with it.

After reconstructing the array, I rebooted the server with the original CentOS on it and then upgraded all packages and the kernel. It's been working just fine ever since.

Answer 2

It seems to be a hardware problem, inspect the server, check if CPU cooling is function properly, test/replace server's memory.