OK, I bit the bullet and removed the "goto abort" in raid5.c
I was then able to mount everything and recover all of my data without
any problem. Hm.
There should be a way to do this with mdadm without recompiling the
kernel, but anyway, opensource saved my ass xDDD
Could you explain to me what you did? It sounds very important for me to
understand!
Well, I ought to update.
So the kernel refused to start my raid because it was dirty and degraded.
I understand this, but getting some data out is better than none. I knew
that the PC had crashed while starting the array. So, it wouldn't have had
much time to cause a lot of corruption. Most likely everything was
alright, just marked dirty. So I just removed the test in the kernel which
refuses to start the array in this condition (that's why I love
opensource). And it worked.
raid5.c in the 2.6.14 kernel :
if (mddev->degraded == 1 &&
mddev->recovery_cp != MaxSector) {
printk(KERN_ERR "raid5: cannot start dirty degraded array for
%s",mdname(mddev));
goto abort;
}
I just commented out the goto abort.
Anyway, that's not the end ! I got 3 harddisk failures in a week. All
maxtor 250G SATA HDDs. I RMA'd the first one and got a new drive. It
worked for 2 days and then boom. So I went to all the computer shops
around here and they only had maxtor so I bought another maxtor. AND
YESTERDAY IT DIED TOO.
I spent a lot of time with google, and :
Kanotix was not the culprit ; it's nvidia. Turns out the nforce 3 and 4
chipsets have some SATA problems. This might be a hardware issue, or maybe
a driver issue, who knows, but the end result is this :
- My nforce 3 / Athlon 64 PC running Linux has 4 SATA ports (2x 2 ports)
- 2 of these ports (sda and sdb) are compatible with maxtor harddrives
(ie. it seems it works)
- the other two (sdc and sdd) are not compatible with maxtor drives.
My other computer, which has a nforce4 mobo / Athlon 64 PC and runs
windows, has the exactly same problem !
- If I plug a seagate harddrive as sda,b,c,d, it works.
- If I plug a maxtor harddrive as sda or sdb, it works.
- If I plug a maxtor harddrive as sdc or sdd (the other sata ports), on
linux it works for a day or two then the drive "dies" ; on windows it just
fucks everything up (takes forever to boot, disk management console
crashes, mouse freezes, disk exists then disappears, etc).
Re-plugging the "dead" drive as sda or sdb makes it work ! So now all is
well. I have plugged my 2 maxtor drives on the "maxtorphile" sata sockets,
and the 2 seagate drives on the "maxtorphobe" sata sockets. Everything
works. I feel like banging head against wall.
Oh yeah, on linux I also deactivated USB, firewire, and unplugged teh
CDROM drive. Who knows. It seems to work now. At least it has worked for
24 hours now.
Actually it's quite hallucinating. And I found people in forums with the
same experience ! Some guy had to unplug his IDE CDR to get his SATA hdd
to work. On windows. Cool. Actually sata + nforce = broken.
(the "maxtorphile" sata sockets are not driven by the nforce chipset but
by a SIS chip, or so it seems).
DON'T BUY NFORCE FOR MAKING SATA RAID !!!
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