Soft Raid 5 error:"bitmap initialisation failed: -5" pls hlp

[laufandreas]

Hi there!
A friend has a dell 4550 Documentation with Opensuse 11 on it. It has 4 drives, one to boot, three 160 Gig for the RAID 5 array.

After hooking up a monitor (VNC does not work at that stage) I can read the error message:

md1: bitmap file is out of date (150 < 151_ -- forcing full recovery
md1: bitmap initialisation failed: -5
md1: failed to create bitmap (-5)
mdadm: failed to RUN_ARRAY /dev/md/1: Input/output error.

and so on. It ends with

"repair filesystem"

I am searching and reading for the past days and find no solution for this.

I tried forcing the array (also with that "echo" thingi), dis- and reattaching the drives (both hardware and software), but all has not worked thus far.

Some of the messages I got were like
"bitmap file is out of date" (151/150)
"mdadm: device /dev/sdb not suitable for any style of array"
"Uuu" 1

But searching for those terms yielded no practical info.

All drives are OK hardwarewise, checked them sector by sector.

I am totally new to Linux unfortunately, but try to learn this amazing OS.

I read into mdadm (and I'm lost) and as mentioned tried several approaches.

Has anybody encountered this weird "bitmap initialisation failed: -5" error? searching it revealed no resulst, so this might be a new thing?

Thanks!

[twinge]

Hello,

I seem to be having the same issue as you. I made a post (see Failed Software RAID-5 - openSUSE Forums for details) about it and I was wondering if you are getting the same results using --examine and -D as I am. Unfortunatly I haven't got anywhere but I am hoping someone here can help me (or us ).