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I've had a software RAID1 array in production for over a year which has LVM partitions on top of /dev/md0. I rebooted over the weekend to apply some kernel patches and now the array won't come up. Getting the "Continue to wait; or Press S to skip mounting or M for manual recovery" on boot. I hit M, login as root, and the RAID array is up, but none of the LVM partitions are available. It's like everything is gone. I stopped the array and brought it up on a single disk (it's RAID1) with --run. Ok, the lvm stuff is there now. So I added a new disk and add it to the degraded array. It starts rebuilding. I do an fdisk of the new disk I just added and there's a brand new partition there of type 'Linux LVM'. I did not add that partition. What's going on? I'm not even using partitions, I'm just using the raw devices.

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    Someone put that partition table there. I bet this is a Debian-derived system. BTW, it's a bad idea to use the raw devices as RAID members, for exactly this reason. Jun 2, 2013 at 2:56
  • What's the significance of Debian mean in your statement? Is there a long-standing issue with Ubuntu that I don't know about? As far as using the raw devices, why? The RAID wiki says it's perfectly OK (raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Partitioning_RAID_/_LVM_on_RAID) here is a working example that would result in a partitionable device made of two disks -- sda and sdb: I've tried building the RAID device using partitions of type FD and as soon as I put the LVM over /dev/md0, it turns the FD types into LVM. I finally said screw it and hard partitioned. That worked. Jun 3, 2013 at 14:21

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Only way I could get the software raid array stable was to leave LVM off and hard-partition. I tried using both raw devices, as well as type 0xFD partitions and as soon as I tried using LVM across /dev/md0, the partition types would automatically change from 0xFD to "LVM" on all the raid members. Very, very strange. I've been using LVM over Linux software RAID for nearly a decade and have never seen this problem before. I'm buying an Areca card.

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