On Monday 23 February 2009, NeilBrown wrote: > On Tue, February 24, 2009 5:13 am, Harry Mangalam wrote: > > Here's an unusual (long) tale of woe. > > > > We had a USRobotics 8700 NAS appliance with 4 SATA disks in > > RAID5: > > <http://www.usr.com/support/product-template.asp?prod=8700> which > > was a fine (if crude) ARM-based Linux NAS until it stroked out at > > some point, leaving us with a degraded RAID5 and comatose NAS > > device. > > > > We'd like to get the files back of course and I've moved the > > disks to a Linux PC, hooked them up to a cheap Silicon Image 4x > > SATA controller and brought up the whole frankenmess with mdadm. > > It reported a clean but degraded array: > > Isn't it nice that it was Linux inside that box, rather than some > proprietary OS with some undocumented raid metadata.... And that it used mdadm.. - /IT/ worked perfectly. > > The docs and files on the USR web site imply that the native > > filesystem was originally XFS, but when i try to mount it as > > such, I can't: > > I heard Dave Chinner talking about this during LCA-2009. > If I remember correctly, there is something a bit funny about > structure layout and padding on the ARM and it affects XFS is some > strange way, and some NAS vendors 'fixed' it the wrong way, so they > are incompatible with mainline..... or something like that. What I > really remember is ARM + XFS + NAS == BAD Vendor > > I suggest asking at xfs@xxxxxxxxxxx Thanks - I'll go over and bug them a bit before I give up. > > No, those other partitions are relevant. One was clearly for > swap. The other was probably /boot. Yes, I now remember that it did provide a small /boot (+ a bit of OS space). I added some utils there while I was testing it before I decided it was too much effort for the return. Thanks very much for the note. -- Harry Mangalam - Research Computing, NACS, E2148, Engineering Gateway, UC Irvine 92697 949 824-0084(o), 949 285-4487(c) --- Good judgment comes from experience; Experience comes from bad judgment. [F. Brooks.] -- 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