Fedora 10, software RAID weirdness

[Christopher K. Johnson]

Kanwar Ranbir Sandhu wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I wanted to upgrade my F10 system to F11 (fresh install), but F11's
> anaconda wouldn't detect my md RAID sets. I booted back into F10 and
> after a bit of investigation, I discovered fdisk can't even read the
> partition table of my 3 drive RAID 5 set. But, a look at /proc/mdstat
> reveals md is happy.
>
> Disk /dev/sdb doesn't contain a valid partition table
>
> Disk /dev/sdd doesn't contain a valid partition table
>
> Disk /dev/sde doesn't contain a valid partition table
>  
> Personalities : [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] 
> md2 : active raid5 sdb[0] sde[2] sdd[1]
>       976772992 blocks level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [3/3] [UUU]
>   
Not weird given that the 3 block devices used by md2 are not partitions, 
but the entire drives.

Without the partition table and partitions marked as type linux raid 
autodetect, it is not surprising that anaconda does not recognize and 
assemble md2.

I cannot recommend exactly how to solve this since I don't know what you 
have on md2, nor what backup options you have.  So I don't know whether 
you need to boot in rescue to do this.  But I would recommend you backup 
md2, deconstruct it, create a single large partition on each of sdb, 
sdd, sde, of type linux raid autodetect, and construct a new md2 using 
those sdb1, sdd1, and sde1 partitions, then restore the data.

Chris