SATA Problems Part II

Last weekend i got the replacement disk for my broken sata disk and reinstalled it. I found a manual quite quick but had some serious problems since i either got one of the two following errors while trying to rebuild the raid 1 array:

ata1: Timeout
ata1: DMA Timeout

Although i had some ideas what could be wrong my last solution was to change the SATA Cable and that was all it needed...


Rebuild Array

To rebuild an array with a clean disk i found this guide useful:
http://www200.pair.com/mecham/raid/raid1-degraded-etch.html

Although it was written for IDE Disks you can use it also for SATA..

Here the needed parts extracted:
We start by copying the partition structure from /dev/hda to /dev/hdc. We do this for what should now be an obvious reason: the secondary drive is empty, but it needs to have the same structure as the primary drive. If the disk was first cleaned, and is large enough, you should have no errors (but you may still have to --force it):

sfdisk -d /dev/hda | sfdisk /dev/hdc

We make sure the superblocks are zeroed out on the new drive (as always, be careful you do this to the correct drive). Edit as needed:

mdadm --zero-superblock /dev/hdc1
mdadm --zero-superblock /dev/hdc5
mdadm --zero-superblock /dev/hdc6

Now we add our three hdc partitions to the corresponding md's.
Understand what you are doing here before you do it, edit as needed:

mdadm --add /dev/md0 /dev/hdc1
mdadm --add /dev/md1 /dev/hdc5
mdadm --add /dev/md2 /dev/hdc6

Watch them sync:
watch -n 6 cat /proc/mdstat

Once the recovery is complete (and not until then), create a new boot records on both drives:
grub

From the grub> prompt (edit partition number if needed):
root (hd0,0)
setup (hd0)
root (hd1,0)
setup (hd1)
quit