botched RAID, now e2fsck or what?

Eric Sandeen sandeen at redhat.com
Wed Dec 9 05:09:30 UTC 2009


Lucian Șandor wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> Somehow I managed to mess with a RAID array containing an ext3 partition.
> 
> Parenthesis, if it matters: I disconnected physically a drive while
> the array was online. Next thing, I lost the right order of the drives
> in the array. While trying to re-create it, I overwrote the raid
> superblocks. Luckily, the array was RAID5 degraded, so whenever I
> re-created it, it didn't go into sync; thus, everything besides the
> RAID superblocks is preserved (or so I think).
> 
> Now, I am trying to re-create the array in the proper order. It takes
> me countless attempts, through hundreds of permutations. I am doing it
> programatically, but I don't think I have the right tool.
> Now, after creating the array and mounting it with
> mount -t ext3 -n -r /dev/md2 /media/olddepot
> I issue an:
> e2fsck -n -f /media/olddepot
> However, I cycled through all the permutations without apparent
> success. I.e., in all combinations it just refused to check it, saying
> something about "short read" and, of course, about invalid file
> systems.

As Christian pointed out, use the device not the mountpoint for the fsck arg:

[tmp]$ mkdir dir
[tmp]$ e2fsck -fn dir/
e2fsck 1.41.4 (27-Jan-2009)
e2fsck: Attempt to read block from filesystem resulted in short read while trying to open dir/
Could this be a zero-length partition?


 :)

-Eric




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