Apparent total loss of all Raid 1 data from both drives`

Robin Laing Robin.Laing at drdc-rddc.gc.ca
Thu Mar 5 17:36:36 UTC 2009


Bruno Wolff III wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 05, 2009 at 10:26:57 -0500,
>   Robert Karge <rkargeconsulting at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Any help would be very much appreciated.  I have reloaded F10 (on the boot
>> drive) but both drives from the original Raid 1 still appear to be totally
>> empty.
>>
>> It is paradoxical how much the total loss of years of work and data teaches
>> about better backup functionality.
> 
> It is unlikely that you have really lost all of the data based on what you
> said you did. You do want to be careful about what you do now so that you
> don't make things worse while trying to fix things.
> The rescue disk suggestion is probably the way to start.
> If you are going to try to do something dangerous, you may want to consider
> pulling one of the disks. This has its own set of risks though and you would
> want to make sure if you got things back, that you back stuff up before
> trying to add the disk back into the raid array.
> 

I will agree with this. statement.

With a 500GB drive, I would use this as a work disk.  I would do an 
install that doesn't look at the RAID drives.  I would actually 
disconnect them.

Now you said that you rebuilt the RAID.  After to did a rebuild, did you 
have the same LVM settings?  I ask  this because I had a real nightmare 
with LVM and a RAID 1 some time ago.  I refuse to use LVM now.

How much data is on the rebuilt array?  What does df give you?

If worse comes to worse, you can use forensic tools to scan your drives 
for data.  I had to do this with my problem.  I put the one drive into a 
USB port and mounted it read only to scan the drive.

The worse thing you can do is panic and rush.  It took me almost a week 
to recover some data after I forgot to back it up when I did a full 
system redesign and rebuild.

Good luck.

-- 
Robin Laing




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