Upgraded 11.04->11.10 - system now says raid 1 array degraded

[KeithLM]

The "bug" (more of a discussion), you are referring to, underlines the confusion surrounding the boot_degraded option [ being an "option" it may mislead some admins as, if set to yes, may bring about the shadowing of a hard disk problem ].

The actual bug identified by dangriffin shows that there is a race condition - not less - between the MD arrays assembling process and the arrays health checks ; the latter may start before all the arrays are fully assembled. In that case, the boot is interrupted and you are asked if you want to continue with a "degraded array" ... all of this happening while Ubuntu shows the "purple screen of death" (i.e. you don't even see the "degraded array" question since Ubuntu flashes that purple color - normally for 2 seconds, but in this case until you answer!).

So you could answer "yes" to that question [if you can see/guess it] and carry on... since the arrays were fully assembled in the meantime (and skip the health checks btw).
Some people, fed up with this race condition bug, may have indeed used the boot_degraded option to boot "normally" (while hiding a possible real HD problem). But the option itself is not the bug people are here talking about, in this thread.

I understand the situation with this bug. And Dan's fix works perfectly for me. The question is, has an appropriate bug been filed and this solution posted as a suggestion? I think that's the issue as to why this hasn't been fixed in 12.04. So far as I can see, Dan's solution wasn't posted in bug postings that seem related to this issue.

[nanog]

There is a bug report that exactly describes the problem we are having. It was mistakenly marked as a duplicate by the triager.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...dm/+bug/917520

Please confirm this bug.

[v4169sgr]

Lets hope this fix makes it into Ubuntu 12.04 so that mdadm works correctly on a default install.

It didn't

I struggled for two days before finding this thread.

Very grateful I did though - thanks dangriffin!!!

[BAUSTIECH2]

DANGER - DO NOT USE UBUNTU 12.04 IF YOU HAVE ANY SOFTWARE RAID

There is a race condition that randomly marks good RAID arrays as failed. This triggers an error that, due to another bug, ignores the "bootdegraded=true" kernel work-around parameter. The end result is you end up in an initramfs shell called "busybox" that is a blackhole of doom and downage.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...0?comments=all

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ls/+bug/778520

And it's made much worse if you have nVidia video, which, due to another bug and/or driver issue, hides everything so you can't see anything of what's going on.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...b2/+bug/699802

[sungaMagnus]

@dangriffin, you save my life.
I've been haunted by this for over half year and spent over the last 3 days and endless time resync the "degraded raid"

Ubuntu should fix this.

Many thanks.

[ca_20gti]

Out of curiosity, I am wondering if this will fix my issue. Actually it sounds identical to the issue I am having everything is fine until the purple screen. Then Boot = NOPE!

And after "scanning" the thread it looks as though this might only affect raids and I do not have a raid set-up even though my box has the options for a hardware raid if I wanted to do such a thing.

The strange thing is, the machine was booting fine until I formatted and reinstalled 12.04 (fresh install). Previously I was using 12.04 that was upgraded from 10 or 11, it was a while ago and don't remember... The machine was crashing often and tons of errors (reason for the format). Could it be this issue was resolved because the machine was upgraded and not freshly installed

I am running a mixture of SAS (OS and Video/Audio) and Normal SATA drives (for data only). I will try this when I get home.

It's just a pitty I didn't find this last night before installing the OS 4 times! lol

[ca_20gti]

Nope , didn't even have the option... Guess I am on to something else