nihilist wrote:

> Well, it's not the HDs. I just attempted the same thing, and am
> getting the exact same error. 2005.0, chuff chuff chuff. I'm going
> to try the 2004.3, and see if that works. If it does, well, time to
> go and submit a bug.
>

I finally pulled down 2004.3 and mdadm seems to work fine.

1) I nuked the drives (used dBaN), then partitioned using 2004.3:

128MB /dev/hda1 & /dev/hdc1 (boot)
2048MB /dev/hda2 & /dev/hdc2 (root)
2048MB /dev/hda3 & /dev/hdc3 (swap)
(rest) /dev/hda4 & /dev/hdc4 (user files)

2) Then I did the following:

# modprobe md
# ls /dev/md*
ls: /dev/md*: No such file or directory
# for i in 0 1 2 3; do mknod /dev/md$i b 9 $i; done
# ls /dev/md*
/dev/md0 /dev/md1 /dev/md2 /dev/md3

(As a side note, I'm not sure that I had to create the nodes by hand,
but I had issues with 2005.0 where the md[x] nodes weren't being created
automatically.)

# modprobe raid1
# mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/hda1 /dev/hdc1
mdadm: array /dev/md0 started.
# mdadm --create /dev/md1 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/hda2 /dev/hdc2
mdadm: array /dev/md1 started.
# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1]
md1 : active raid1 hdc2[1] hda2[0]
2000256 blocks [2/2] [UU]
[==>..................] resync = 13.8% (277760/2000256) finish=3.6min
speed=7920K/sec
md0 : active raid1 hdc1[1] hda1[0]
125376 blocks [2/2] [UU]

unused devices: <none>

(I include the following lines for sake of completeness. I typically
wait until the resync has finished before firing off the next mdadm
command.)

# mdadm --create /dev/md2 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/hda3 /dev/hdc3
# mdadm --create /dev/md3 --level=1 --raid-devices=2 /dev/hda4 /dev/hdc4

At this point, I have to go back and read the documentation some more.
But at least 2004.3 mdadm doesn't throw the bd_claim error at me. I
don't have a lot of time to muck with 2005.0 this week to figure out why
it's dying, so I'm going to forge ahead with 2004.3 and get the box up
and running.