Hi there. Please pardon my lack of experience and expertise here, as this is my first time posting. Where I work there is a fairly old fileserver. It is running CentOS 4, kernel 2.6.9-100EL Recently it failed and it tries to boot, but fails part way with: RAID5: not enough operational device for md1 (2/4 failed). This machine has data for a number of users, and, of course it seems the backup has not been roperly done for a few months ( responsible staff member left). I am in the position of being teh only likely person with a chance of recovering the data for a few users on this machine. And I am certainly NOT an expert! So, here is what I have done so far: On further inspection, I disconnected the drives out one at a time and determined which 2 are "failed". I pulled those out, and on another machine ran Seagate Seatest for Linux to test them. They both came out as healthy, although one apparently has a lot of uncommited bad sectors, or so the disk tool on a Fedora14 mchine tells me. I looked and see the layout is each of the 4 disks present have 2 partitions. After testing I was able to see the partitions on each disk with fdisk. I did not try to mount as these are simply RAID members, and I know there is no complete filesystem to mount on any single drive here. First partiton on each drive is small, /boot, and it seems to be RAID1 on all 4 drives. Those are healthy enough to get partially into a boot. The machine still boots to the point of trying to get access to / and then kernel panics. The / and other parts are on a RAID5 made from the second partiton of the 4 disks. I have returned all 4 disks to the machine, and using CentOS install/recovery media, have teh machine up in rescue mode. At this point I believe that I need to rebuild the RAID5. I understand that I probably only get one chance to do this right, so I write here today to beg some help with this. I do not lose other peoples data, Can anyone make me a suggestion? Thaks in advance for any help ! John Valarti - under a lot of pressure.. -- 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
