Hi all, this looks bad: I have a RAID5 that showed a disk error. The disk failed badly with read errors. Apparantly, these happen to be at locations important to the file system, as the RAID read speed was some kb/s with permanent timeouts reading from the disk. So I removed the disk from the RAID, to be able to take a backup. The backup ran well for one directory, and then completely stopped. It turned out another disk also suddenly showed read errors. So the situation is: I have a four-disk RAID5 with two active disks, and two that dropped out at different times. I made 1:1 copies of all 4 disks with ddrescue, and the error report shows that the errorneous regions do not overlap. So I hope there is a chance to recover the data. But for the filesystem mount, there were only read accesses to the array after the first disk dropped out. So my strategy would be to convince md to accept all disks as uptodate and treat the read errors on two disks, and the differing filesystem metadata as RAID errors that can hopefully be corrected. The mdadm report for one of the disks looks like this: /dev/sdb3: Magic : a92b4efc Version : 0.90.00 UUID : f5ad617a:14ccd4b1:3d7a38e4:71465fe8 Creation Time : Fri Nov 26 19:58:40 2010 Raid Level : raid5 Used Dev Size : 1951945600 (1861.52 GiB 1998.79 GB) Array Size : 5855836800 (5584.56 GiB 5996.38 GB) Raid Devices : 4 Total Devices : 3 Preferred Minor : 0 Update Time : Fri Jan 4 16:33:36 2013 State : clean Active Devices : 2 Working Devices : 2 Failed Devices : 1 Spare Devices : 0 Checksum : 74966e68 - correct Events : 237 Layout : left-symmetric Chunk Size : 64K Number Major Minor RaidDevice State this 3 8 51 3 active sync 0 0 0 0 0 removed 1 1 8 19 1 active sync /dev/sdb3 2 2 0 0 2 faulty removed 3 3 8 51 3 active sync My first attempt would be to try mdadm --create --metadata=0.9 --chunk=64 --assume-clean, etc. Is there a chance for this to succeed? Or do you have better suggestions? If all recovery that involves assembling the array fails: Is is possible to manually assemble the data? I'm thinking in the direction of: take the first 64k from disk1, then 64k from disk2, etc.? This would probably take years to complete, but the data is of really big importance to me (which is why I put it on a RAID in the first place...). Thanks, Michael -- 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