mdadm - setting spare drives active

[Christopher Pharo Glæserud <glaserud-debuser@orakel.ntnu.no>]

I have a mdadm raid-5 using hd[egik].

A couple of days ago mdadm reported that hdg had failed. No biggie.
The problem is that the real failed drive is hdi (gets a bunch of dma
errors trying to read from it, whereas hdg seems to be just fint).

My status now is that I have hdi marked as active and hdg marked as
spare (I imagine hdg going from failed to spare has something to do with
some frantic mdadm --trysomething commands).

So, what I want to do is:

Make mdadm set hdg as active and hdi as failed and start the array with
hd[egk]. Does anyone know if this is possible?

Output from 'mdadm --examine /dev/hdg':

/dev/hdg:
          Magic : a92b4efc
        Version : 00.90.00
           UUID : 191f3d06:2b9c84ac:864c2b6f:6ac8e919
  Creation Time : Sat Dec 13 17:00:07 2003
     Raid Level : raid5
    Device Size : 199148480 (189.92 GiB 203.93 GB)
   Raid Devices : 4
  Total Devices : 4
Preferred Minor : 0

    Update Time : Wed Jan 12 10:53:31 2005
          State : dirty
 Active Devices : 3
Working Devices : 4
 Failed Devices : 1
  Spare Devices : 1
       Checksum : 6ca92473 - correct
         Events : 0.855770

         Layout : left-symmetric
     Chunk Size : 64K

      Number   Major   Minor   RaidDevice State
this     4      34        0        4      spare   /dev/hdg

   0     0      33        0        0      active sync   /dev/hde
   1     1       0        0        1      faulty removed
   2     2      57        0        2      active sync   /dev/hdk
   3     3      56        0        3      active sync   /dev/hdi *
   4     4      34        0        4      spare   /dev/hdg       *

Basically, make hdi and hdg swap places without syncing the array.

-- 
regards, 

Christopher Pharo Glæserud