Multiple Disk Failure Recovery

I have a RAID 5 setup with one spare disk. One of the disks failed, so I replaced it, and while it was recovering, it found some bad sectors on another drive (unreadable and uncorrectable SMART errors). This generated a fail event and shut down the array.

When I restart the array with the force command, it starts the recovery process and dies when it gets to the bad sectors, so I am stuck in an infinite loop.

I am wondering if there is a way to cut my losses with these bad sectors and have it recover what it can so that I can get my raid array back to functioning. Right now I cannot get a spare disk recovery to finish because these bad sectors. Is there a way to force as much recovery as possible so that I can replace this newly faulty drive?

Thanks
Lane

One technique is to use ddrescue to create an image of the failing drive(s) (I would image all drives if possible) and use those images to try to retrieve your data.

-Dave

I'm currently writing error supression md layer precisely for situations like this to remove the need for the dd step.

Obvisouly it doesn't recover the data in the bad sectors or masked by errors but the aim is to reduce to need of doing multiple copies which recoversy procdure tend to invovle.

TTFN

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