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I have a bunch of old 1T disks with an mdadm array on them. They had been out of commission for awhile, but yesterday I slotted them into a server running an up to date Debian Jessie.

Eventually I got the array back together, but two drives refused to re-add. Looking at these drives, it appeared that I had somehow added the devices to the array rather than the (Linux RAID autodetect) partitions (sdz rather than sdz1) - I get what appears to be proper output for mdadm -E /dev/sdz, but if I run mdadm -E /dev/sdz1, I get mdadm: cannot open /dev/sdz1: No such device or address.

Looking into it further, it seems that the partitions for these two drives are character special devices rather than block special:

root@comp:~# file /dev/sda1        # good drive
/dev/sda1: block special (8/225)
root@comp:~# file /dev/sdz1        # bad drive
/dev/sdz1: character special (8/209)

Even after zeroing the entire bad drive with dd and recreating the partitions with fdisk, they still come back the same way! What's going on here?

Edit: Here's what ls says about these devices:

root@comp:~# ls -l /dev/sdz*
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 65, 0 Feb  1 15:02 /dev/sdz
cr-------- 1 root root 65, 1 Jan 31 18:31 /dev/sdz1

E2: Relevant numbers from /proc/partitions:

root@comp:~# cat /proc/partitions | egrep 'sdz|sda'
  65        0  976762584 sdz
  65       32  976762584 sda
  65       33  976760832 sda1

I don't understand why the sdz partiton is not showing up here.

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  • Can you post the output of ls -l /dev/sdz*? Are those automatically created by udev? Do you perhaps have rules that do that? What happens if you remove them and create proper block devices with mknod with the same major nr as sda, but a relevant minor number?
    – Halfgaar
    Feb 1, 2015 at 20:17
  • You zeroed the entire /dev/sdz? sdz is a proper block device. I have no idea why its partition would be a character device.
    – Halfgaar
    Feb 1, 2015 at 20:22
  • @Halfgaar added the ls output to the original post. Yes, all these device entries are created automatically, I have specified no special rules and I'm not really sure how to do that.
    – ACK_stoverflow
    Feb 1, 2015 at 20:24
  • What is the output of fdisk -l /dev/sdz?
    – Tero Kilkanen
    Feb 1, 2015 at 20:27
  • @TeroKilkanen You set me on the right path. I don't know why this was happening originally, but deleting /dev/sdz1 (the character device partition) and calling partprobe /dev/sdz caused the new partition to show up. Very weird, but this works.
    – ACK_stoverflow
    Feb 1, 2015 at 20:33

1 Answer 1

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Deleting /dev/sdz1 (the character device partition) with just a rm /dev/sdz1, and then calling partprobe /dev/sdz caused the new partition to show up properly.

I have no explanation for why this originally happened, but this solution worked for me.

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