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Raid 5 broken, invalid root filesystem on boot
Posted by sh4ka, 10-05-2010, 08:51 PM Hello guys, Hope you can give me some light on this, i'm totally lost here! Few days ago I updated suse linux 11.0 (i didn't chosen this OS, it was already installed) to get latest security packages including kernel. Updated using zypper up and everything was ok, the new kernel entries were installed at /boot/grub/menu.lst, so, everything look ok and I decided to reboot.. The system got totally offline, this has a raid 5 setup with 4 500 GB SATA HDs, now the problem is that while loading the system after I choose the entries on Grub, and after almost all the hardware is recognized by the system, when it comes to the raid detection i got this error: Then I'm droped out into sh console without almost anything to do in a very limited shell. Does anybody know how can I fix this error? I've tried to boot with a ubuntu live cd to rescue the important data on the raid but the raid isn't recognized as it, and i just see the 4 physical disks. Any idea how can I rebuild the Raid 5 to recover the information from a live cd? This customer doesn't have any backups (his fault!), so it's important to be able to access the data. Thanks a lot!
Posted by 24nt7linux, 10-06-2010, 10:33 AM You will need to boot the system off install media and see about rebuilding the array.
Posted by sh4ka, 10-06-2010, 10:54 AM I don't want to mess with rebuilding the raid, don't have any knowledge about raid systems, so i will probably screw up the information. Is it possible to recover the data without rebuilding the raid array? I just attached one of the drives to another server i have and now i am able to mount the /boot partition (sda1), i can see kernel files and so on.. However, when I try to mount /dev/sda3 (the / 470 GB partition) i got this error: Any ideas how to recover data from 1 RAID 5 HDD isolated from the raid array? Thanks!
Posted by YUPAPA, 10-07-2010, 09:05 AM You should be mounting the raid device rather than the hard drive device. Since you are using software raid, I assume you should be checking on /dev/md0 which is faulty raid array. Use mdadm to remove, rebuild and check the status of the array.
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