back
Software RAID under Linux next

Background Reconstruction

raidbox# mkraid /dev/md0
handling MD device /dev/md0
analyzing super-block
disk 0: /dev/sda1, 2032kB, raid superblock at 1920kB
disk 1: /dev/sdb1, 2032kB, raid superblock at 1920kB
disk 2: /dev/sdc1, 2032kB, raid superblock at 1920kB
md: md0: raid array is not clean -- starting background reconstruction
raid1: raid set md0 not clean; reconstructing mirrors
The mirror is constructed in background, transparently, using idle I/O bandwidth. The array is quite usable during reconstruction, it can be formatted and used. Of course, there is no redundancy.
Progress of the reconstruction is shown in /proc/mdstat. Here is /proc/mdstat after reconstruction is finished:
raidbox# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1]
read_ahead 1024 sectors
md0 : active raid1 sdc1[2] sdb1[1] sda1[0]
1920 blocks [2/2] [UU]
RAID-0 can be broken up, and each disk mounted separately (useful for emergency recovery).