failed to read root inode

[Stan Hoeppner]

Christian Affolter put forth on 5/9/2010 10:35 AM:

> That's a good question ;) Honestly I don't know how this could happen,
> all I saw were a bunch of errors from the RAID controller driver. In the
> past two other disks failed and the controller reported each failure
> correctly and started to rebuild the array automatically by using the
> hot-spare disk. So it did its job two times correctly.
> [...]
> 
> kernel: arcmsr0: abort device command of scsi id = 1 lun = 0
> kernel: arcmsr0: abort device command of scsi id = 4 lun = 0
> kernel: arcmsr0: abort device command of scsi id = 4 lun = 0
> kernel: arcmsr0: abort device command of scsi id = 4 lun = 0
> kernel: arcmsr0: abort device command of scsi id = 4 lun = 0
> kernel: arcmsr0: abort device command of scsi id = 2 lun = 0
> kernel: arcmsr0: ccb ='0xffff8100bf819080'

Ok, that's not good.  Looks like the Areca driver is showing communication
failure with 3 physical drives simultaneously.  Can't be a drive problem.

I just read through about 20 Google hits, and it seems this Areca issue is
pretty common.  One OP said he had a defective card.  The rest all report
the same or similar errors, across many Areca models, using many different
drives, under moderate to high I/O load, under multiple *nix OSes, usually
lots of small file copies is the trigger.  I've read plenty of less than
flattering things about Areca RAID cards in the past.  This is just more of
the same.