On Sunday April 1, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Neil Brown wrote: > > On Saturday March 31, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >> hi list! > >> > >> in short: > >> I created a partitioned raid6 array with 2 missing drives. Now, I want to > >> add a device. It fails with: > >> flockmock ~ # mdadm -a /dev/md_d4 /dev/sdb2 > >> mdadm: add new device failed for /dev/sdb2 as 4: Invalid argument > > > > Thanks for the detailed problem report. > > > > I think the cause of the error is that /dev/sdb2 is too small. > > It needs to be at least 490030594 sectors. How big is it? ^^^^^^^ I should have said 490030594 sectors or 245015297 KB, which would have made it clearer, sorry.
> > but the *device* size should be only ~250GB, so the array size is ~500GB, no? > > flockmock ~ # mdadm --detail /dev/md_d4 > /dev/md_d4: > Version : 00.90.03 > Creation Time : Sat Mar 31 19:48:58 2007 > Raid Level : raid6 > Array Size : 490030464 (467.33 GiB 501.79 GB) > Used Dev Size : 245015232 (233.66 GiB 250.90 GB) > ^^^^^^^^^^ > > these disks are all 250 GB harddisks, formatted in the same way -- but they > are from different > vendors! The block sizes from the partitions vary a little bit (taken from > /sbin/fdisk): > > /dev/sda2: 245015347 > /dev/sdc2: 245015347 > /dev/sdb2: 244099642 -> different vendor > > do you think that may be the cause? Definitely the cause. If you really need to add this array, you may be able to reduce the usage of the array, then reduce the size of the array, then add the drive. Depending on how you have partitioned the array, and how you are using the partitions, you may just need to reduce the filesystem in the last partition, then use *fdisk to resize the partition. Then something like: mdadm --grow --size=243000000 /dev/md_d4 Is is generally safer to reduce the filesystem too much, resize the device, then grow the filesystem up to the size of the device. That way avoids fiddly arithmetic and so reduces the chance of failure. NeilBrown - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/