Hi, I just set up a new server running stable Debian Sarge, fresh install, mdadm 1.9.0, linux kernel 2.6.8-2 and all my (test) data has vanished into the ether. What did I do wrong? I don't want this to happen in real life :). I have 6x 400Gb Western Digital sata drives attached to sata controllers. One pair of channels is on the motherboard using VIA VT8237 controller and 2 highpoint 1520 sata cards give 4 other channels. /dev/sda /dev/sdb /dev/sdc /dev/sdd /dev/sde /dev/sdf I partioned each hard drive completely as 1 partition, type fd ie fdisk then "n p 1 enter t fd w q": /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 /dev/sde1 /dev/sdf1 I then created 3 raid1 arrays mdadm -Cv -n2 -l1 /dev/md0 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 mdadm -Cv -n2 -l1 /dev/md1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 mdadm -Cv -n2 -l1 /dev/md2 /dev/sde1 /dev/sdf1 I then formated mkfs.ext3 /dev/md0 mkfs.ext3 /dev/md1 mkfs.ext3 /dev/md2 I then mounted mount /dev/md0 /home/big0 mount /dev/md1 /home/big1 mount /dev/md2 /home/big2 I then waited until all syncing was done. Then I copied 3 gb of data to the 3 arrays from another machine over the network via rsync. I did df -h and indeed the data was there. I cd into the directories and there was data there. Then I did shutdown -h now however I did not!! (?evil) umount the different devices /dev/md0 /dev/md1 /dev/md2 before doing that. Now I reboot into linux. I try to assemble the arrays mdadm -A /dev/md0 /dev/sda1 /dev/sdb1 mdadm --detail --scan gives me nothing at all. And I get nothing. I do fdisk -l and no trace of any of the partitions. It is as if there are no partitions /dev/sdX1, where X is a-f. I do fdisk /dev/sda I get message: Device contains neither a valid DOS partition table, nor Sun, SGI or OSF disklabel Building a new DOS disklabel. Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them. After that, of course, the previous content won't be recoverable. The number of cylinders for this disk is set to 48641. There is nothing wrong with that, but this is larger than 1024, and could in certain setups cause problems with: 1) software that runs at boot time (e.g., old versions of LILO) 2) booting and partitioning software from other OSs (e.g., DOS FDISK, OS/2 FDISK) Warning: invalid flag 0x0000 of partition table 4 will be corrected by w(rite) p shows nothing!! ?????????????????????????????? Did I screw up everything by not unmounting the devices? What happened? Thanks, Mitchell Laks - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
