Replacing a failed drive

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Is your array still redundant

You are running a three-disk mirror, or RAID6, I trust. And have a spare drive configured to take over when one fails?

This is the ideal scenario. When one drive fails, the RAID will seamlessly replace it with a spare, and life will carry on without the user noticing anything is wrong. Most of us don't have the hardware to support all that. Or, as has been told to the author on several occasions, the admins/operators were not monitoring the array and did not realise anything had gone wrong until (almost) too late.

If you are running an array you need to monitor it. Failed drives must be removed and replaced as soon as possible. If your array is still redundant, then just remove the failed device and replace it.

Remember, RAID is not a backup! If you lose redundancy, you need to take a backup! The act of trying to recover an array is often enough to trip another drive over the edge an cause the entire array to fail.

ddrescue or rebuild

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