Topic: HELP - Trying to recover data from virtual SME 7 Server on ESXi4

[jarthurs]

Had a non-essential server keel over several months ago and unfortunately I don't have another machine which meets the hardware requirements for ESXi 4 or 5. The data is all safely stored on a pair of 500Gb drives attached to an Adaptec 2410 SATA RAID controller and I thought it would be nice and straightforward to recover.

I've attached the drives to my Ubuntu 12.10 desktop and managed to extract the flat VMDK image containing the SME 7 server. I've read this using kpartx and have the two partitions attached as /dev/mapper/loop0p1 and /dev/mapper/loop0p2 but any attempt to mount the drives fails with mount: unknown filesystem type 'linux_raid_member'.

I've tried mounting them with mdadm but just get '<partition> exists but is not an md array'.

Can anyone shed any light on this?

Thanks,
Jason.

[Daniel B.]

Both are not directly  formatted but are RAID members. You first need to assemble the RAID:

Code: [Select]

mdadm --assemble /dev/md1 --run /dev/mapper/loop0p1
mdadm --assemble /dev/md2 --run /dev/mapper/loop0p2
Now, /dev/md1 should already be working, but is only /boot of your old server, so, nothing really important. /dev/md2 is where your data is stored. But, still, you won't directly find a filesystem on it, there's another layer: LVM.

Code: [Select]

# Discover the volume group
vgscan
# Enable all the logical volumes on this volume group
vgchange -ay main

and now, you should have /dev/main/root available that you can mount where you want to copy the data