Topic: Big trouble with raid array

[Confucius]

Mathijs,

Every new disk will have it's own factory set File System. In most cases (almost all) this will be not the 1 that's used for RAID settings.
with a fdisk -l you can see what file system your newly attached drive is having. You'll also see the filesystem used on the other disks.
Since I'm doing RAID1 and not RAID5 I might be thinking the wrong way but my impression is that RAID = RAID and therefore has the same basics for the disks.

Harro

[Gaston94]

Hi,
did hdf was one of your old drives ? If so I am afraid things are done.
Everything that messages you are reporting indicates is that the disk "hdf" is not (anymore?) initialised, neither as a member of a raid array nor within any suitable partition.
This should not scarry me if this was about any new inserted disk

The only things I am certain about are :
 - if you were having 4 disks in your array,
 - if ONLY one disks from this 4 failed (in fact one of the active one, but there ar few chance that the faulted disk was the spare one) , you might recover your data
 - if more thant one disk failed, nothing from my knowledge can be done (some companies might recover your faulted device and then rebuild the array, but this is out of my competences, and might cost much - something like from 200$ up to ... )

Regarding the "Linux raid autodetect" partition system id, I realy don't think it has anything to do so far. Your disk were partitionned and set with this id at the early installation stage. As far as I experienced it was only for help in automatics actions (and I know I have already built raid over "Linux" - id=83 -, even this might not be recommended)
We should have care about for integrating a new not initialized disk in the array.

But may be some other people around there might have some other advices.

G.

[kryptos]

Hi,

I have experienced this twice on the same server but luckily i was able to restore my data. My 3rd disk has malfunctioned. What i did was remove the defective drive replace it with a good one with same capacity of course and boot my SME CD using rescue mode. Assemble back the arrays first i tried the fail,remove and re-add the arrays using mdadm utility but fails then i try the --Assemble --force option then it start rebuilding the arrays. I have found that the power supply of the server were not very stable so i replaced with another power supply with a higher wattage. And now the server is running smoothly. Hope this can help a little in recovering you data.

Regards,
Rocel

[Sijhtam]

Thanx for all the sugestions. But i hav made a fresh install.
Never know if your option works kryptos
Thank you for your help
Mathijs