Comment 48 for bug 990913

I just upgraded an Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTM to 12.04 LTM and was affected by this bug.

# mdadm --version
mdadm - v3.2.5 - 18th May 2012

# uname -a
Linux srv001 3.2.0-70-gerneric-pae #105-Ubuntu SMP ...

My system is a Dell PowerEdge 2900 with four 250 GB WD Harddrives.

Three of them are configured to build an RAID5 using mdadm (Metadata Version is 0.90, creation Time was May 2007. Chunk size is 64K, Layout left-symmetric.). The root filessystem is NOT part of the RAID.

Since I upgraded to 12.04.5 I get following messages from initramfs every time I reboot the system:

Begin: Running /scripts/init-premount ... done.
Begin: Mounting root files system ... Begin: Running /scripts/local-top ... done.
Begin: Running /scripts/local-premount ... *** WARNING: There appears to be one or more degraded RAID devices **

The system may have suffered a hardware fault, such as a disk drive
failure. The root device may depend on the RAID devices beeing online. One
or more of the following RAID devices are degraded:
Personalities : [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10]
md0 : inactive sdc1[0](S) sdd1[1](S)
           488279296 blocks

unused devices: <none>
You may attempt to start the system anyway, or stop now and attempt
manual recovery oprations. To do this automatically in the future,
add "bootdegraded=true" to the kernel boot options.
[...]

I cannot skip dropping into a shell:

Dropping to a shell.
(initramfs)

It is possible to just exist the initramfs and go on booting. Systems comes up and I can manually repair the raid by adding missing disks / recovering if necessary.

Maybe it is not related to that issure but while booting I get the following error messages for each of the four drives:

ata_id[234]: HDIO_GET_IDENTITY faild for '/dev/sdb': Invalid argument
ata_id[236]: HDIO_GET_IDENTITY faild for '/dev/sdd': Invalid argument
ata_id[235]: HDIO_GET_IDENTITY faild for '/dev/sdc': Invalid argument
ata_id[237]: HDIO_GET_IDENTITY faild for '/dev/sde': Invalid argument

I can manually reproduce this by running "hdparm -i /dev/sdc":
/dev/sdc:
 HDIO_GET_IDENTITY failed: Invalid argument

Regarding to bug #1029822 it may help to add an additional "exit 0" in line 2 of
/usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/local-premount/mdadm
and run "sudo update-initramfs -u" and reboot. (Haven't tested this solution yet)

I tested adding "sleep 15" but without success.

There is a good summery of RAID related issues on
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/ReliableRaid