some background…
I am an IT guy trying to help out a friend. This linux setup belongs to his church. So they have no funds for IT help. The original IT person that setup system is no longer available. So here’s the problem. One of the hard drives of the RAID1 setup failed and the original machine is no longer availabe. All I have is one IDE hard drive from the RAID array. They have asked for my help which I have limited Linux experience but can follow directions well.
Currently, I have the hard drive in a USB enclosure connected to a Dell system I have. I have unplugged all the original Dell system hard drives. It looks like the linux system is 64-bit so this is the only system I have to connect it to. Downside is that has no IDE controllers, hence why it is in a USB enclosure. I can choose to boot to it. When I do, it gets stuck booting up.
<tail of boot process>
Loading raid1
md: raid1 personality registered for level 1
Loading dm-mod
device-mapper: 4.5.0-ioctl (2005-10-04) initialised: dm-devel@redhat.com
Loading dm-snapshot
Waiting for /dev/mapper/control to appear: ok
Loading reiserfs
md: md0 stopped.
mdadm: no devices found for /dev/md0
md: md1 stopped.
mdadm: no devices found for /dev/md1
Unable to find volume group “rootvg”
resume device /dev/rootvg/swap not found (ignoring)
md: md0 stopped.
mdadm: no devices found for /dev/md0
md: md1 stopped.
mdadm: no devices found for /dev/md1
Waiting for device /dev/rootvg/root to appear:…not found – exiting to /bin/sh
$ _
It then hangs here until I do a hard shutdown.
I tried booting to Live 64-bit dvd and went to Rescue System.
You’ll need to use the program mdadm to handle this RAID element. Have a read of the man page or look for a tutorial on the web showing you how to detect and mount a degraded array, then copy your data off it.
ok. so i was able to mount the raid array finally. I found this webpagethat helped my situation which was that this raid array also turned out to be ‘lvm2_member’. I didn’t have to do step 2 because lvm2 was already installed.
Now that it is mounted however, I can see the user data folders but don’t have permissions to access some of the folders. Is there a way to take ownership or get read permission of ‘ALL’ the home directory and subfolders/files so I can just copy the whole home directory to the another external hard drive. Then I can give them that external hard drive and they can decide what they need from that.
Hi
If you have booted from a live cd use the sudo command I think linux is
the password.
sudo -i
Else is you boot from a normal dvd/cd in Rescue mode you can login with
user root and then press enter when it ask for the password. From there
you can manually mount and browse.