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

[Davias]

I was dropped to busybox on my RAID1 Ubuntu 12.04 AMD64 system uptodate. cat /proc/mdstat reported [U_] on all 3 md devices (/, swap & /home), but I was pretty sure the disk (sdb) was functional. 
On reset I pressed ESC to get to the grub menu to select rescue, I could see the message "array degraded press Y to boot degraded" but could not, it automaticcally selected N and drop me again into busybox. From there I could resync the array manually with:
mdadm --add /dev/md0 /dev/sdb1 
waited for the md0 to resync and checked again with cat /proc/mdstat that md0 was ok. Repeated the operation for md1 and checked, then md3 and checked again that all MD devices were [UU] good. Reset and the system came up OK!
I then checked extensively disk sdb with SMART that reported no errors and no bad sectors. Did a surface test: ok; a fsck, ok.

So, bottom line, array went out of sync for no apparent reason, and could not start degraded...
Any ideas?

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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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