Comment 16 for bug 990913

I have now installed Precise on my system. (I had intended to install as a multiboot, along with the existing Oneiric, but apparently the alternate installer could not recognize my existing /boot RAID1 partition, so now I can't boot Oneiric. But that's another story...)

Note that the title of the original bug report refers to 12.04 Server, but I have a Desktop system, installed with the Alternate disk.

This time I installed / on a non-RAID partition. My pre-existing RAID partitions are now mounted as directories in /media, except for /boot, which is still on the same MD partition as before.

I have now rebooted several times since installing 12.04. The previous behavior of hanging during shutdown has not recurred. Also, pleasantly, the previous behavior of hanging during boot (between the GRUB splash and the Ubuntu splash) has also not recurred.

I am getting error messages on the Ubuntu splash screen (under the crawling dots) about file systems not being found. I have seen these occasionally for many years, and have become quite accustomed to them. It says I can wait, or hit S to skip, or do something manually; I wait for a while, but soon give up on that and hit S because waiting NEVER accomplishes anything. I'm not sure why that option is even mentioned.

Fortunately, this has not been happening with my /, so I can successfully log into Ubuntu.

Once there, I start up palimpsest (Disk Utility) and look at the RAID partitions. Generally, about half of them are degraded or simply not started.

The ones that are not started are the ones mentioned in the error messages on the splash screen. I can start them from palimpsest; sometimes they start degraded, sometimes not.

After about an hour of work, all of the degraded partitions are fully synchronized. I usually have to re-attach some components as well. Haven't lost any data yet.

Sometimes I cannot re-attach a component using palimpsest and have to drop to the command line, zero the superblock, and then add the component. This has always worked so far. I only noticed this particular behavior since installing Precise.

In short: On this system, RAID usually degrades upon reboot. It did this with Oneiric (but only starting a few weeks ago) and it does this with a freshly installed Precise.

Around the time this behavior started with Oneiric, I did a lot of maintenance work on this hardware, including:

1) swapping out one hard drive

2) putting some 1.2 metadata RAID partitions on, where previously all were 0.90 metadata

I have not noticed any correlation between metadata version and degradation. Any of them can get degraded, in an apparently random fashion.

Between reboots, the system runs just fine. Hard drive SMART health appears stable. The newest hard drive is reported as healthy.