On Sat, 18 Mar 2006, Ewan Grantham wrote: > OK, managed to use assemble force to get the five remaining drives of > the array up in degraded mode. But running ex2fsck (I had an ext3 fs > on the RAID) is revealing a number of bad dtimes and invalid blocks. > Trying to run ex2fsck with the -p option doesn't work for long, and > having to hit enter after each line is testing my patience. > > So, am I likely to have any good data by the time I finish anyway, or > am I wasting my time? Any quicker way to cleanup the filesystem to > find out? You might be able to mount it read-only and copy the data off, but who knows what you might actually be copying. There is a -y option to fsck which assumes a yes answer to all the questions. It's never a good option, but sometimes the only option unless you have an intimate knowledge of ext2/3 and an infinite amount of time to sort it out. I had to do this recently to a trashed 4-disk Raid-5 array - it had been one disk down for some time and despite my telling them that they were living on borrowed time, they didn't do anything about it, until a 2nd disk died. I managed to make it start in degraded mode, then fsck'd with the -y option. 3 times. The array showed less than half the data it originally had, but it seemed to keep them happy.... (and I saw some messages from fsck I'd never seen before!) Fortunately they had a partial backup that was only a day or 2 old, so they got most of the stuff back, but I really suspect some of those file have holes in them and blocks of bogus data. A really quick way to clean up the filessystem is by use of the mkfs command ;-) Good luck! Gordon - 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
