Comment 9 for bug 252365

MNLipp, sbrady69: I think we are actually having a different problem than this bug. Jan's issue is that the spare he has comes from a separate controller (which isn't available in the stock initramfs he was using). I spent a lot of time researching this yesterday, and found that it's actually a race condition: the md devices are assembled too early, before the spare drive has been scanned. I had an additional issue in that I was referring to the drives in mdadm.conf explicitly instead of via UUIDs. I worked around this reliably by using UUIDs in mdadm.conf and by adding a custom sleep script in /etc/initramfs-tools/scripts/local-premount/ ; I'm posting an entry in my diary in case people are interested: http://async.com.br/~kiko/diary.html?date=09.12.2009