Re: RAID 5 Recovery Help Needed

Bill Davidsen wrote:

Depending on your distribution, I would not be surprised to see your
array assemble just fine with or without an ARRAY line, it seems some
try harder than others and I just noticed that the system I use most
has only "super minor" lines for the first three arrays and nothing
for the rest, yet arrays 0..6 all come up at boot.

However, the bad news is that many distributions don't do ext4 very
well, and may mount an ext4 file system as ext3, resulting in damage
which gets worse if you write to it. I would suggest starting the
array, unmounted, running fsck.ext4 on the array, and seeing if it
offers any hope of recovery. If so, after the fsck mount the array
*read-only* and see what's there.

Some distributions seem to need "ext4" on the boot command line to
detect the file system type for mounting. Of course if it's in fstab
it should work correctly, but I wouldn't bet the farm on it.

-- 
Bill Davidsen [off-list ref]
  "Woe unto the statesman who makes war without a reason that will still
  be valid when the war is over..." Otto von Bismark 

  

I have an ext4 partition on another drive working flawlessly, so I don't
think it is or was being mounted incorrectly as ext3.  I have a feeling
the ext4 boot option is needed for the root partition in the cases you
mention.

Thanks for the suggestions.  I've tried a dry run (-n) of fsck without
success, but put off doing a full fsck for fear of corrupting the data
were it to be recoverable.  I will try the full fsck before abandoning
all hope.

Mike