[PLUG] Help please, linux md raid broken

none 1663eesa at robinson-west.com
Thu Jan 8 13:35:03 UTC 2004


On Thu, 2004-01-08 at 12:25, Steven Raymond wrote:
> This morning my RH9 machine "sparky" was off and wouldn't come on.  Swapped 
> power supplies and it now will power up and partway boot but hangs with the 
> following error message:
> 
> raid0: done.
> raid0 : md_size is 75555456
> raid0 : conf->smallest->size is 75555456
> raid0 : nb_zone is 1.
> raid0 : Allocating 8 bytes for hash.
> md: updating md2 RAID superblock on device
> md: hde3 [events: 00000035]<6>(write) hde3's sb offset : 37777728
> md: hde3 [events: 00000035]<6>(write) hde3's sb offset : 37777728
> md: ... autorun DONE.
> md: Autodetecting RAID arrays.
> md: autorun ...
> md: ... autorun DONE.
> md: Autodetecting RAID arrays.
> md: autorun ...
> md: ... autorun DONE.
> Creating block devices
> Creating root devices
> Mounting root filesystem
> VFS: Can't find ext3 filesystem on dev md(9,2)
> mount: error 22 mounting ext3
> pivotroot: pivot_root(/sysroot,/sysroot/initrd) failed:2
> umount /initrd/proc failed: 2
> Freeing unused kernel memory: 156k freed
> Kernel panic: No init found.  try passing init=option to kernel.
> 
> I don't think that the disks are ruined and hope that my data may be 
> recoverable.  Running Disk Druid off the install disc 1 still shows the raid 
> devices and partitions are still mostly recognized.  Only md2 (my / 
> partition, of course) seems to have lost it's ext3 formatting:

I wiped a raid out once by not booting with a raid enabled kernel.
The md recovery thread seems to be enabled regardless, at least in
Redhat.  Maybe it was attempting to fsck one of the partitions in
the raid set directly, I don't think you're supposed to do this.
The best bet is to not treat raid as a backup option until a 
recovery method is known.  The biggest difficulty I ran into is
confused documentation on RAID, there are old tools that 
shouldn't be used with the new code.  Kickstart may
be your friend for raid recovery, especially if you build a
custom package set that contains your modifications and custom
compiled software.  I've never built a raid with spare disks, 
these most likely are backups that can be used for recovery 
if you can reformat all the non spare disks in your raid.
The latter may require a utility Linux system seperate
from the one built on your raid.

     --  Michael C. Robinson





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