Bug#769201: mdadm hangs rather than fails to assemble non-existant array

[Arthur Marsh]

Package: mdadm
Version: 3.3.2-2
Severity: important

Dear Maintainer,

*** Reporter, please consider answering these questions, where appropriate ***

   * What led up to the situation?

At one stage in the past I had a filesystem mirrored using mdadm.

At present only one half of the mirror exists and that file system has been
mounting normally most times.

Under some conditions of file system / partition table corruption due to 
power failures, mdadm will just hang when attempting to assemble the 
non-existant array rather than just fail and let the boot process continue.


   * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
     ineffective)?
   * What was the outcome of this action?
   * What outcome did you expect instead?

*** End of the template - remove these template lines ***


-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers unstable
  APT policy: (500, 'unstable'), (500, 'testing'), (500, 'stable'), (500, 'oldstable'), (1, 'experimental')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 3.18.0-rc4 (SMP w/2 CPU cores; PREEMPT)
Locale: LANG=en_AU.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_AU.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/bash

Versions of packages mdadm depends on:
ii  debconf      1.5.53
ii  initscripts  2.88dsf-57
ii  libc6        2.19-13
ii  lsb-base     4.1+Debian13+nmu1
ii  makedev      2.3.1-93
ii  udev         215-5+b1

Versions of packages mdadm recommends:
ii  exim4-daemon-light [mail-transport-agent]  4.84-3
ii  module-init-tools                          18-3

mdadm suggests no packages.