[ILUG] Linux soft Raid death of hda

[Niall O Broin]

On 13 Feb 2005, at 22:43, Frank Murphy wrote:

>>> Whateve is done has to preserve the info already on md0 & md1
>> I assume you have TWO raid arrays then. If not then you have 
>> practically
>> no RAID.
> The info is safe just can't access at the moment.

You're not being a model of clarity here, Frank, I'm afraid. From your 
last mail it sounded you like you wanted advice on how to set up RAID, 
having seen one disk die, but now it sounds like you already had RAID-1 
and want to get back the data from the remaining disk.

If that is the case, then you need to simply boot from a rescue CD and 
mount the partitions of the remaining disk (if you have two partitions 
in a Linux md RAID-1, you can mount the filesystem from either of these 
partitions from a rescue disk, as the filesystem data on each will be 
identical)

>>> 2: A boot cd that can allow me operate the raid & smb shares as 
>>> normal.
>> This can be does with any rescue cd, you can even use the standard FC3
>> bootCD --> "linux rescue", start networking etc.
>
> How would it know what's in smb.conf or fstab, which was on dead hda.

fdisk -l /dev/hdc

assuming /dev/hdc was the other disk of the RAID, will list the disk 
partitions for you. From that it shouldn't be too hard to guess what's 
what. Even if you have no idea, you could just mount each partition one 
after the other (skipping any of type 82 - they're swap partitions) and 
examine the content.


Niall