Putting a spare Raid device back to active state

Question

I have a problem with my Raid setup. I have 3 disks in my Raid:

md2 : active raid5 sdc3[3](S) sdb3[4](S) sda3[0]
      2925532672 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [3/1] [U__]

md1 : active raid1 sdc2[2] sdb2[1] sda2[0]
      264960 blocks [3/3] [UUU]

md0 : active raid1 sdc1[2] sdb1[1] sda1[0]
      2102464 blocks [3/3] [UUU]

As you can see the /dev/md2 is not correctly installed in the Raid, 2 disks are not in active state.

mdadm --detail /dev/md2 gives me something like

Number   Major   Minor   RaidDevice State
   0       8        3        0      active sync   /dev/sda3
   1       0        0        1      removed
   2       0        0        2      removed

   3       8       35        -      spare   /dev/sdc3
   4       8       19        -      spare   /dev/sdb3

So there are somehow two disks in the state spare.

I tried to add them via mdadm /dev/md2 -a /dev/sdb3 and mdadm /dev/md2 -a /dev/sdc3 respectively, but I didn't work.

Do you have an idea what kind of steps I need, to get them into the Raid again?

Answer 1

If I'm not misreading your output, you have a RAID-5 array with two failed devices. There's no recovering from that; the array has been lost.

Delete the md device, recreate it, and restore from backups.

Answer 2

When you say "didn't work", what was the error message? Also, can you provide

fdisk -l /dev/sdX

output for each physical disk?