raid5 question

[Gabriele Alberti]

Hello,
I wanted to ask a (maybe stupid, I'm not a kernel hacker) question.
In software raid5 (linux 2.4.18) why when there is a multiple disk failure
(no spare disks) does the raid device continue to work? It couldn't be better
if the device hangs? It happened to me to have 2 disks stopped
(I don't know why, they were not broken) but the raid5 device continued to work,
so when I restarted the system and the "faulty" disks, the raid (mkraid -f)
actually restored the filesystem but with filesystem corruption; I guess
this happened because someone wrote to the faulty raid.

Does it work so or I'm missing something? (I'm sure about the n.2 :-)

Thanks in advance, best regards,

        Gabriele Alberti