[Ldsoss] OT: RAID5 recovery issues

[Richard Smith]

I didn't get a response off this list, however I did get help elsewhere.  I 
wound up using Sabayon (don't ask, only distro that was happy with everything 
about my emergency PC with the drives installed)  I was able to get my array 
up, do a mysqldump, get my photos off, and other stuff.  I decided to let 
email go since, well I was doing pop access gmail, and my messages are still 
on google's servers.

I've re-thought my system situation.  I had a mythtv system that was housing 
everything.  I've still got the mythtv system, but it's in a different case 
that doesn't have the room for my raid array, and gets too hot with too much 
stuff in it anyhow.

Thanks for the concern though, it's appreciated.

-Richard

On Sunday 04 March 2007 20:17, Shane Hathaway wrote:
> Richard Smith wrote:
> > Well, I've just had a motherboard die on me, in my kubuntu-amd64 system.
> > This was after I had managed to recover my RAID array (one member got
> > lost..
> > somehow no md superblock it said), but before starting to fix some sort
> > of upgraded udev weirdness.  This array was housing my music, photos,
> > email, etc, all the stuff you don't want to lose. Managed to get things
> > mounted and
> > checked before I got too tired to continue.  I had set up 4 disks in a
> > RAID5
> > array, so that I wouldn't lose data if one drive died.  The Hard drives
> > were
> > old, but the other bits of the computer are less than 18 months old. I
> > didn't expect the motherboard to go kaput, and since it's a 754, a
> > replacement board is a bit harder to come by.  Oh, it's a software raid,
> > made with mdadm, with a LVM group on top of it.  Now, I've got a spare
> > system that should POST fine, but it's an old 650 MHZ Athlon, and buried
> > somewhere hard to get to.  Would I be able to access this RAID to recover
> > stuff, even though the filesystem was set up using tools compiled to run
> > on 64 bits?   Has anything similar happened to anyone else, and can you
> > give me
> > bits of advice?  Also.. if I am able to recover stuff, should I migrate
> > the system onto a single drive large enough to house my current system?
> > (raid array was nowhere near full when this whole mess started).
>
> Did you ever get a response to this?
>
> Assuming 3 of the 4 drives are still good, you should be in good shape.
>  Just plug the drives into a spare box (Intel or AMD, 32 or 64 bit, it
> doesn't matter) and boot with an Ubuntu CD.  The system should
> auto-detect both the RAID and LVM.  You should be able to copy all of
> your files to a removable hard drive.
>
> Linux's software RAID is a real win in this situation, BTW.  Hardware
> RAID cards are helpful when disks fail, but they're troublesome when
> it's the motherboard that fails instead.
>
> Shane
> _______________________________________________
> Ldsoss mailing list
> Ldsoss at lists.ldsoss.org
> http://lists.ldsoss.org/mailman/listinfo/ldsoss