> Have you had the same problem, in that softraid wouldn't assemble the > RAID volume with a missing disk? How did you "remove" the failed device > from the RAID array (ie. you 'add' the new disk with -R during rebuild, > but how do you 'remove' the failed/offline drive with eg. bioctl)?
No, in fact I used RAID5 purely for testing if I broke something during my softraid hackings or not. My testing of RAID5 was intensive offlining and rebuild with a new drive. No, I've not used 4 real drives, but in fact just 2 real drives and on every just 2 RAID partitions. I created array with something like -l /dev/sd0a,/dev/sd0d,/dev/sd1a,/dev/sd1d -- or so and then randomly put some drive/partition off-line by bioctl -O and then used the same to rebuild by bioctl -R. If you put drive offline it'll be offline and will not be attempted to be added again if its health status changes (somehow and whatever it means). softraid founds its drives since it uses (1) specific RAID partitions and (2) it saves specific metadata to the partition. This way RAID partitions (those already part of some array) know what array they are part of. That also means that if you use bioctl -c on drive/partition which is already part of some array, it'll not attempt array creation but array attachement. It's somewhat misleading and I always felt that there should be clear "attach" and "create" options in bioctl but so far have not come with any patches for this. Anyway, easy testing. Do you have some windows/linux machine with virtualbox or do you use openbsd with vmd? If so just create virtual openbsd environment with several drives and test what I suggest: (1) create RAID5, (2) put one of the drives into off-line mode (3) rebuild with another drive. Easy isn't it? If this runs fine for you, do the same on real array...and pray/cross your finger/do whatever you do in this case. :-)
