My home server runs Ubuntu 12.04 with a software RAID 5 array and since a couple of days I’ve been getting e-mails from the SMART daemon warning me of uncorrectable errors on one of the drives. Today I took the time to take the failing drive out and check it with the tools from the manufacturer.

Because I didn’t want to run the risk of unplugging the wrong drive with the system on (and thus losing the whole RAID array) I shut the server down, removed the harddrive and started it again. The idea was that it would boot right back into the OS, but with a degraded RAID array. Unfortunately the server didn’t come up… After connecting a keyboard and monitor to it it turned out that the system was waiting with an initramfs prompt. From there I could check that the RAID array was indeed degraded, but functioning fine as I could manually mount all partitions.

Some Googling later I found out that by default Ubuntu doesn’t boot into a degraded software RAID array. This is to make sure you as administrator know something is wrong. A good idea for a laptop or PC, but not for a standalone server. The solution is the following:

  • From the initramfs prompt mount your original filesystems, for example in /mnt.
  • Use chroot /mnt to change root into your server’s hard disks.
  • In the file /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/mdadm add or change the line to 
    BOOT_DEGRADED=true
  • Then run 
    update-initramfs -u

    to regenerate the initial ramdisk.

  • Type exit to exit the chroot environment.
  • Unmount your file systems and reboot

Now your server should continue booting even though it has a degraded RAID array.

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