Now I have another RAID problem. Each disk is partitioned like:

/dev/sd[abcd]1 - bios boot partition
/dev/sd[abcd]2 - md0 - /boot (I believe grub can now see inside lvm but this 
config predates that)
/dev/sdX3 - md1 - lvm - /root + others

I have been progressively replacing disks. sdd was fine, sdc was fine, then I 
replaced sda to test that booting worked (changed bios to boot from sdb, added 
new sda, added to raid, etc) and that didn't work because I mucked up the gpt 
bios boot partition. Having fixed that, I rebooted to test booting again while 
md1 was still rebuilding onto sda3, and it drops into the initramfs shell on 
boot because mdadm first sees sda, then tries to add sd[bcd]3 but because each 
of those disks say that sda3 is not consistent the rebuild fails leaving just 
sda3 present as a 'spare' drive. In the initramfs console I just manually stop 
the array, add sd[bcd]3, then sda3, and it's all good again, but I didn't think 
this was the way it was supposed to work.

On the most recent boot I zero'd the superblock of sda3 before re-adding it, 
thinking maybe it had picked up some bitrot somewhere along the way, but I'm 
not confident. Because the server is responsible for running backups and last 
night's backups didn't work because it was down, I'm not going to touch it 
again until tonight's backups are complete, but any hints on how to make this 
work smoother next time would be appreciated!

And just to recap, rebooting a RAID comprising of /dev/sd[abcd]3, when 
/dev/sda3 is being rebuilt, results in a boot that drops into the initramfs 
shell because it appears that mdadm tries to add /dev/sda3 first then rejects 
the other 3 disks because they say /dev/sda3 is inconsistent (which it is).

Thanks

James

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