On Tue, February 24, 2009 5:13 am, Harry Mangalam wrote:

Here's an unusual (long) tale of woe.

We had a USRobotics 8700 NAS appliance with 4 SATA disks in RAID5:
 <http://www.usr.com/support/product-template.asp?prod=8700>
which was a fine (if crude) ARM-based Linux NAS until it stroked out
at some point, leaving us with a degraded RAID5 and comatose NAS
device.

We'd like to get the files back of course and I've moved the disks to
a Linux PC, hooked them up to a cheap Silicon Image 4x SATA
controller and brought up the whole frankenmess with mdadm.  It
reported a clean but degraded array:

Isn't it nice that it was Linux inside that box, rather than some
proprietary OS with some undocumented raid metadata....

The docs and files on the USR web site imply that the native
filesystem was originally XFS, but when i try to mount it as such, I
can't:

I heard Dave Chinner talking about this during LCA-2009.
If I remember correctly, there is something a bit funny about structure
layout and padding on the ARM and it affects XFS is some strange way,
and some NAS vendors 'fixed' it the wrong way, so they are incompatible
with mainline..... or something like that.  What I really remember is
ARM + XFS + NAS == BAD Vendor

I suggest asking at xfs@oss.sgi.com

No, those other partitions are relevant.  One was clearly for
swap.  The other was probably /boot.

Good luck,
NeilBrown