Comment 2 for bug 252365

I'm sorry for having let this bug linger for such a long time. I think I have now found the proper solution to this problem.

Restating the problem: I have six disks, four of which are served by a sata-sil24 controller, the other two being served by a sata-via controller. The active partitions of my raid5 set live on the first four disks, the spare partitions live on one of the other two disks (the other being used for backup).

With the above setup, the active members of the raid set would come up fine upon boot, but the spares would not be added automatically, so that I had to add them from /etc/rc.local

On my system, this problem has been solved by including both sata modules in the initrd image. That is: I added sata-via and sata-sil24 to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules , rebuilt the initrd images using update-initramfs -u -k all, and everything is now activated automatically on boot.

Bjorn Ruud: can you let us know whether your spare disk is also served by a controller that requires a different module from the one serving your active disks? If so, would you give the above a go and report back?