On Mon, 2 Feb 2004, Nigel Metheringham wrote: > [Copy to list - original accidently only sent to Boris] > > On Sat, 2004-01-31 at 06:19, Boris Lenhard wrote: > > Recently our sysadm accidentally powercycled our server (RedHat8) > > after 198 days of uptime, and upon boot it insisted on checking one > > partition (/dev/sda7) in our RAID. When it was done, the files were in > > the state of August 23 last year, with anything newer either gone or > > invisible. I guess something went wrong with journaling data. What can > > I do to restore the current state (except restore from backup, which > > is an unfavorable option on Saturday morning) ?. > > This really can't be an ext3 fault. > > It sounds more like a disk went offline in a RAID1 pair and then the > disks swapped over on the restart (or the disk that been offline came > online and the other disk was synced to it). If you have 2 (sets of) > disks running in the current RAID set and they are synced I'd say you > need your backups. Otherwise its a case of working out how to get the > right half of the RAID1 set up and then fixing from there. It's also possible that there was a doublly mounted filesystem. For example, /dev/sda7 was mounted as /var/ on top of an already mounted /dev/md6. Processes have the namespace of /dev/sda7 and all the new data gets written there. When the system reboots the raid1 array is unpinned and reconstructed, and possibly mounted only once (/dev/sda7 may or may not be mounted), and presto, once the reconstruction finishes you have your original data. I've actually seen this happen :\ I'd be interested if you are able to prove or disprove this theory based upon a previous copy of /etc/mtab and/or /proc/mounts and/or /proc/mdstat Regards, Matthew Galgoci -- Matthew Galgoci System Administrator Red Hat, Inc 919.754.3700 x44155 _______________________________________________ Ext3-users@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/ext3-users
