disk recovery help

From: Charles Sprickman (spork_at_fasttrackmonkey.com)
Date: 07/20/04

  • Next message: Charles Sprickman: "Re: disk recovery help" 
    Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2004 19:14:39 -0400 (EDT)
To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org

    Hi,

    I'm sorry for hitting this list, but I'm trying to target people with some
    good old-fashioned recovery procedures in their toolboxes, and people that
    have a better understanding of UFS than I do.

    I'll try to keep this brief. We are looking for either some "here you go"
    help, or if there's someone who's really a whiz at this, paid help...

    The story, in brief, and what we're looking for:

    We have a mail server that had it's RAID array trashed by a typo. No
    backups (perhaps this will make the budget for that appear). There are
    four disks running in RAID 1+0 on an Adaptec 2110s. While replacing a
    failed drive I screwed the pooch with a typo. I meant "raidutil -a
    rebuild" but I typed "raidutil -a build". That command ran for about 45
    seconds before I realized what had happened and cut power to the box.

    fsck was able to fix / with no problems, and most other partitions. We
    reinstalled the base OS and rebuilt all our local additions (ports +
    vpopmail/qmail/courier-imap-pop) in case there was any corrupted gunk left
    on the drive. However the partition holding all the mail (in Maildir
    format, working with vpopmail/qmail) seemed quite screwed. We let fsck
    try for about 12 hours and had to cancel out of it. While working on
    other things, I dd'd off this partition via ssh to another machine (ssh
    borked.box dd if=/dev/da1s1h bs=1024 > dd.img) hoping that we could do
    something with it later. Once that was done, we newfs'd that partition
    and let vpopmail recreate mailboxes as mail came in. So we're done on
    that front, but missing all old mail.

    I now have the disk image on a spare box. It's 26GB (about 20GB of actual
    data). My initial plan is just to see what happens if I mount it
    read-only, and then try to fsck without any time pressure and see what
    we've got left. Since I wasn't able to figure out how to dd this back to
    a pre-partitioned drive, I was going to try vnconfig to attach the dd
    image to vn0, then mount and fsck that. Should that work?

    I have little faith that all this will work though... If anyone has some
    tips/pointers/prayers, let me know. Again, we can probably dig up some
    cash if someone with experience in this would like to help.

    I'm still waiting for some info from Adaptec to see exactly what the
    "build" option does, and where it starts from and how far it might have
    got in that period of time. Oddly, the last tech that called for more
    info said he was going to ask DriveSavers (as they know that stuff???).

    Please email me directly with any other questions. I wanted to keep this
    as brief as possible since it's fairly OT.

    Thanks,

    Charles
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  • Next message: Charles Sprickman: "Re: disk recovery help"

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