<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 9/17/07, <b class="gmail_sendername"><a href="mailto:f-myth-users@media.mit.edu">f-myth-users@media.mit.edu</a></b> <<a href="mailto:f-myth-users@media.mit.edu">f-myth-users@media.mit.edu
</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"> > Date: Mon, 17 Sep 2007 22:22:19 -0700<br> > From: "Steve MacLaren" <
<a href="mailto:scram69@gmail.com">scram69@gmail.com</a>><br><br> > Out of desperation, I even booted off the liveCD, used Synaptic to install<br> > mdadm in the liveCD environment, and then attempted to assemble the array
<br> > (sudo mdadm --assemble --scan). Exact same result: "md0 assembled with 4<br> > devices" followed 10 seconds later by a reboot...<br><br>I haven't exactly been following this thread closely, but I suddenly
<br>had an idea---this smells of a power supply problem.<br><br>Try this hypothesis on for size: Your PSU went marginal, which is<br>what caused the original crash. The machine will now stay up as long<br>as you -don't- try to pull maximum power. But what happens the
<br>instant you start trying to assemble your four-disk array? All the<br>heads start thrashing around and your drives go to maximum power<br>demand, causing your PSU to undervolt just enough to cause the CPU<br>to reset.
</blockquote></div>
It hadn't occurred to me, but now that I think about it, it's not all that far-fetched. I only saw the segfault message once; now that I can reliably boot on the -15 kernel, it no longer shows up in the message log. I've gone ahead and ordered a new PSU. In the mean time, I'll try dd'ing each drive like you mentioned.
<br><br>Thanks for the suggestions!<br>