On Monday 23 February 2009, NeilBrown wrote:

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

quoted

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....

And that it used mdadm.. - /IT/ worked perfectly.

quoted

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

Thanks - I'll go over and bug them a bit before I give up.

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

Yes, I now remember that it did provide a small /boot (+ a bit of OS 
space).  I added some utils there while I was testing it before I 
decided it was too much effort for the return.
Thanks very much for the note.

-- 
Harry Mangalam - Research Computing, NACS, E2148, Engineering Gateway, 
UC Irvine 92697  949 824-0084(o), 949 285-4487(c)
---
Good judgment comes from experience; 
Experience comes from bad judgment. [F. Brooks.]