Well, we'll see what we end up with. I'm still not sure why I had such
a mess in the first place since it was a single disk failure, and I
caught it fairly quickly. Only thing I can figure is that it had
something to do with the fact that failure happened during an e2fsck
run in the first place.

Thanks for at least telling me an option to take the drudgery out of
it. Was driving me crazy having to hit enter so many times :-)

On 3/18/06, Gordon Henderson [off-list ref] wrote:

On Sat, 18 Mar 2006, Ewan Grantham wrote:

quoted

OK, managed to use assemble force to get the five remaining drives of
the array up in degraded mode. But running ex2fsck (I had an ext3 fs
on the RAID) is revealing a number of bad dtimes and invalid blocks.
Trying to run ex2fsck with the -p option doesn't work for long, and
having to hit enter after each line is testing my patience.

So, am I likely to have any good data by the time I finish anyway, or
am I wasting my time? Any quicker way to cleanup the filesystem to
find out?

You might be able to mount it read-only and copy the data off, but who
knows what you might actually be copying.

There is a -y option to fsck which assumes a yes answer to all the
questions. It's never a good option, but sometimes the only option unless
you have an intimate knowledge of ext2/3 and an infinite amount of time to
sort it out.

I had to do this recently to a trashed 4-disk Raid-5 array - it had been
one disk down for some time and despite my telling them that they were
living on borrowed time, they didn't do anything about it, until a 2nd
disk died.  I managed to make it start in degraded mode, then fsck'd with
the -y option. 3 times. The array showed less than half the data it
originally had, but it seemed to keep them happy.... (and I saw some
messages from fsck I'd never seen before!) Fortunately they had a partial
backup that was only a day or 2 old, so they got most of the stuff back,
but I really suspect some of those file have holes in them and blocks of
bogus data.

A really quick way to clean up the filessystem is by use of the mkfs
command ;-)

Good luck!

Gordon