I have an open Suse 9.3 system with software raid installed. All was running just great until a power outage lasted longer than the UPS and the server went down. It’s been a while since I set the system up so I don’t remember for sure, but I’m pretty sure that I set the I set up both drives with the same partitioning, /boot, swap and /data with the latter being a raid mirror. I’m also pretty sure I formatted everything with ReiserFS.
As best I can tell at the moment the problem is that the partition table is gone. I have tried a recovery CD with gpart and it guesses three partitions on each drive - and they look about right, but it wants to call them EXT2. I’m hoping that all the data is there, but I don’t want to do any writing to the drives until I’m sure of what I need to do.
Anyone have any experience recovering from a similar situation?
After more digging, I find that the partition tables are in tact, just getting a bogus message about no partition table for /dev/md0 which appears to be normal.
So while working more with the system, I find that I can mount and read the boot partition, and If I take out the primary drive, I can mount the raid array, but grub still gives a file not found error message (15). Mounting the array in recovery mode, I can see the top level directories, but can’t see any of the data. Can anyone help with that?
Perhaps I’m missing something . . the array is for RAID1 data partition(s) only? Why not just break the array, get things in order on one of the drives, and then rebuild it?
By the way, Linux and SuSE RAID handling has changed quite a bit; I can’t recall whether that is before/after 9.3.
Thanks for the reply. Perhaps I wasn’t specific enough in my partitioning information. But the root partition is the RAID so the system doesn’t boot.
I did manage to put one of the drives on line yesterday, and the RAID pratition did mount (/DEV/MD0). I was able to see all of my directories, but could not see any files or directories under them. So I’m still looking for help on what to do next.
So the root partition is actually in the array . . .
It sounds like you lost the file system on the array. If you were using RAID1, you should be able to break the array and access the partitions separately as normal. (Of course, if you were using RAID0 striping, you are hosed without a separate backup.) Breaking the array, fixing the problem(s), and then rebuilding the array is I think the s.o.p. in a situation like this.
OK, I’m starting to make progress… I did manage to run reiserfsck on the secondary drive (both the partition and the md0) and it found no errors! YEAH!!! And then I was able mount the md0 and I could see all the data YEAH! YEAH! so now all I have to do is get the primary drive back and bootable and I’ll be back in business.