Hey List,
I have an Ubuntu 9.10 box on which I recently created a software RAID6; you can see what it looks like in rather good detail if I may say so my self ;) here: http://i48.tinypic.com/30jrbdl.jpg
After this set up was all done I shut the machine down for the night.
Now when I boot the machine up to start using the array it wants to run the file system check utility, fsck I believe (like it normally does, every N days or N mounts, "which ever comes first"). This is fine, I assume it wants to do this because its a new volume and I like to know everything is working fine so I would always let this run on any of my machines but on this machine, it gets to the desk top, I can see the process is running via top or the process monitor, but within 1 minute of being on the desk top the machine will locks up and is unrecoverable so I am forced to turn it off? This happens every time, so ever since a week ago when I first made this RAID array, I haven't actually used the damn thing yet!
I can't understand why this would be; I thought it may have been the power supply as it is only 250 watts but I have the machine connected to a watt meter and I added the drives one at a time watching the watts increase, we are only at 140 Watts? I had thought that maybe it was to many devices on one single power cable coming out of the power supply as I have had to use splitters on the power cables so I swapped the power supply out temporarily for one in another machine that is rated for 500 watts and had more power cables coming out of it but no...I also stood another machine next to it, turn them on at the same time and used the 2nd machines power connectors to power some of the drives so the power was shared between the two PSUs, but no it still locked up
Next I thought it was the south bridge being over run but surely it wouldn't of been able to sit there for 20 hours building the RAID and formatting it? Is it possible that the building of the RAID wasn't very intense and now its all set up, when it tries to boot to the desktop and run fsck this is now making the drives work hard and so that only now the systems weakness is showing? (I did try increasing the south bridge voltage but the options in the CMOS are very limited and so I think there was a difference, it stayed on the desktop for 2 minutes before locking up instead of 1, but I can't remember, this would need validating).
I would love to hear anyone's thoughts on how I can get this working again?
P.s. sorry for the length!