[Bug 872220] Re: Fails to boot when there's problems with softraid

[Clint Byrum]

So far everything I've read beyond the original description shows mdadm
working as it is intended.

The question on whether or not to boot degraded is not just about the
root filesystem. The idea is to be very careful and not boot with *any*
disks in a degraded array, as we want to avoid the corruption problem
possible because of bug #557429. If you were to accidentally boot w/o
one of your disks, we want to confirm with you that this was your
intention. We are favoring safety of data over convenience.

You can set your system to boot degraded permanently with

sudo dpkg-reconfigure mdadm

And answer yes to the question.

As to the original complaint, I do see merit in explaining *what* you
might do if you say "N". However, we don't have a friendly way to help
the user recover their arrays, so directing them to mdadm may also be
fairly scary. I'm open to suggestions as to what we might want to
display there, but I don't think this is a bug in behavior, just a
usability problem.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/872220

Title:
  Fails to boot when there's problems with softraid

Status in “mdadm” package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  Ubuntu 11.10 has a new feature that it warns you while booting if
  there's a program with the softraid.

  It tells you that a hard disk in the softraid is missing, then asks,
  on the console:

  Continue to boot? y/N

  But it ignores all keypresses. After 5 seconds or so it then times
  out, falls to the default "N" option, and dumps you to a emergency
  bash prompt, with no indication on how to proceed.

  The feature is a good idea, but not in the current broken state.

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