Failed linux RAID mirror - Help!

[Guern]

Hi,

I have an fc4 box with 2 40g IDE drives in it. The RAID mirror was setup as part of the fc4 graphical install. One of the drives has failed and the machine fails to boot.

Now that I've read a bit more, I see I should have used grub to install the MBR on the other disk as well. I didn't. So, I thought I'd boot linux in rescue mode, use grub to add the mbr, and we'd be back up. Oh dear no... FC4 rescue won't start if you have a disk in degraded mode.

Where to go from here! Help!

Thanks.

 

[mrballcb]

Boot using a Knoppix CD. It has fantastic recovery capabilities. By default it won't mount the partitions it does find, but it puts directories in /mnt for partitions that it finds, so a simple 'mount /mnt/hdb2' would work. Since you're using raid, it might change things a bit, but if you can get the partition(s) mounted, then chroot into it, you will be able to write the MBR using the grub commandline.

 

[Guern]

Thanks. I happened to have a knoppoix cd here, so I tried it. I won't recognise the hard drive, though it does show it. Says it cannot determine the filesystem type.

I can run grub, thought the normal root (hd0,0) or hd1,0 reports no hard disk found

At the worst, I'd hope to be able to mount this somhow and recover the data.

 

[3wsparky]

it looks like the chains or allocation table has only been written to the now failed drive , i expect your infomation is on the disc but is not documented as it were , Stellar Phoenix should sort this out.

 

[3wsparky]

just had a thought , have alook at fsck ( man fsck ) might do the job , not sure if its on your boot cd tho !