Re: shutting down/removing a software RAID array?

Gary Dale staggered into the Black Sun and said:
I've been looking for [how to *stop*] a [softRAID] in Linux.

"mdadm misc /dev/mdN --stop" . This won't work if /dev/mdN is mounted.

I can't get the RAID to cease to exist. My current state after redoing
the dd is shown by this:
#cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1]
md1 : active raid1 hdc[1]
60696128 blocks [2/1] [_U]

Somewhere along the line I must have inadvertently added /dev/hdc to
the md1 array instead of /dev/hdc3.

If you're sure that you don't want to have any softRAID at all, change
the partition type of all former softRAID partitions to something other
than 0xfd. And rm -rf /etc/mdadm* while you're at it. (You can
regenerate that dir structure when you rebuild your softRAID setup
properly.) And check /proc/cmdline to make sure that you're not passing
"root=/dev/md1" or something to the kernel on boot. Also remember that
the md superblock info is stored at the *end* of the partition, so
efficiently erasing that info with dd will require a seek= .

And after trying everything else I can think of to remove the software
traces of the RAID array, a reboot still gives me md1 containing hdc.

Expand on "everything else you can think of". What, precisely, were the
commands you executed?

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Relevant Pages

  • Re: shutting down/removing a software RAID array?
    ... the md1 array instead of /dev/hdc3. ... the partition type of all former softRAID partitions to something other ... Apparently the dd between devices didn't clobber whatever is making the computer think it's got RAID. ... I tried zeroing the superblocks but that gave problems because mdadm won't touch a running RAID volume, ...
    (comp.os.linux.hardware)
  • Re: shutting down/removing a software RAID array?
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