RAID 10 Rebuild Started — Then Crashed
Symptom:
You began a rebuild after replacing a failed disk. Everything looked fine… until it didn’t. Now the system is down, the rebuild aborted, and you may be missing a volume.
What It Looks Like:
- Rebuild process reaches 2–10% and then stops
- Reboot causes RAID controller to hang or drop the array
- One or more drives suddenly go “Foreign,” “Unconfigured,” or “Missing”
- The system won’t boot past POST or shows no usable boot volume
What This Means:
This is a classic case of RAID 10 rebuild misfire — often caused by:
- Rebuilding to the wrong mirror partner
- Controller confusion over which disk has the latest data
- Power interruption mid-rebuild
- Latent sector errors on the “good” mirror partner during rebuild
- Hot-swap without proper metadata sync
What NOT to Do:
- Don’t remove and reinsert disks randomly to “see if it comes back.”
- Don’t run a forced import or force online — especially if one of the drives is marked “foreign.”
- Don’t initialize unless you want to guarantee permanent data loss.
Next Step:
Power off and stop all rebuild attempts. Every moment it stays online risks automatic parity or mirror sync attempts that write over good data.
🛠 Run JeannieLite in diagnostic mode to pull a snapshot of mirror relationships and confirm which disk was being rebuilt. If the wrong mirror direction was chosen, we may be able to undo the damage — but timing is critical.