List,
I thought I would pass this along should anyone else experience a loss
of all partitions on a drive or array. May help somebody out someday:
dmraid Partition Loss with dmraid-1.0.0rc15
Testing dmraid-1.0.0rc15 on a box with two separate dmraid arrays, I
experienced the total loss of all partitions on the second dmraid array. The
first array held an openSuSE install running dmraid-1.0.0rc14 while the second
held Archlinux with dmraid-1.0.0rc15 where testing was being done. All testing
of dmraid-1.0.0rc15 on Archlinux went fine, the problem occurred when the
machine was boot back into openSuSE. Regardless of the situation, whether using
a raid setup or not, partition loss is serious business.
dmraid Partition Recovery
Recovery of dmraid partitions proceed in the same manner as recovering
partitions from a singe drive. if you haven't destroyed the information on the
array, you should be able to put the pieces of the puzzle back together again.
The basic outline for the process is to locate and restore the partitions on
the array and then reinstall the boot loader so your box is functional again.
(Note: if you were smart enough to save the fdisk -l information for your
drives, you can simply fdisk your array and be done)
Tools Required
Partition location and recovery software (I used testdisk)
http://www.cgsecurity.org/
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/TestDisk_Download
http://www.cgsecurity.org/testdisk-6.11.linux26.tar.bz2
Rescue CD for your OS (generally your install CD/DVD, or knoppix, etc.)
Using testdisk
testdisk is a great piece of GPL code written by Christophe Grenier.
testdisk can be used with most operating systems and will scan you disk or
array and locate partition boundaries and give you the opportunity to recover
them. I had 4 partitions dedicated to my Archlinux install totaling roughly 70G
on a 750G raid array. To start testdisk, for Linux26, you will untar the bzip
archive and then cd into the linux subdirectory. The prebuilt binary is:
./testdisk_static
The first thing you will need to do is set the correct disk geometry.
In my case the disk reported 254 heads and needed to be changed to 255 heads to
work properly. (This is recommended if the first Quick Scan doesn't find your
partitions).
After setting the geometry, just choose Analyze and Quick Scan and
go get a coffee or something. In my case since the 70G I was using was at the
front of the 750G array, it had found my partitions within 5 minutes or so.
Once all of your partitions are found you can Stop the scan by hitting the
return key.
You are then presented with the list of found partitions. They will be
initially labeled D for deleted and you simply toggle on the partitions you
need to recover by selecting (P Primary, * Primary Boot, L Logical or
leave as D for Deleted). testdisk will check your selections for partition
overlap and give you confirmation in green if your partition layout is OK. Just
hit return to continue. Don't worry about the extended partition boundary, it
will be provided. Review the partitions to be recovered and choose Write and
your are done. (a reboot is required to activate the partitions)
If no partitions were found during the Quick Scan, then (1) check
your drive geometry setting; and (2) you will be given the option to do an In
Depth Scan (go get 4 cups of coffee, walk the dog, etc...)
Have Your Rescue CD Handy
Once the partition information has been changed, there is a near 100%
chance your boot loader configuration will be messed up. Don't worry,
everything is still there, you just have to reinstall grub or lilo into the
boot record to recover from the situation.
Reinstalling Grub
Here you will be booting from your CD or DVD into rescue mode, using
dmraid to activate the arrays, and then using the information about the dm
nodes in /dev/mapper and the partition information in from cat
/proc/partitions to create a chroot of your install to repair the boot loader:
(1) boot from the install DVD
(2) choose Rescue System, login as root (no password needed)
(3) activate the dmraid arrays with dmraid -ay
(4) check which device nodes to use to create the chroot with ls -al /dev/dm*
or ls -al /dev/mapper. I was dealing with 2 separate arrays, 9 partitions
(duplicated by having both dmraid-1.0.0rc14 and dmraid-1.0.0rc15 metadata) that
left me with dm-0 to dm-20 to deal with. Compare the size shown for dm-X,
/dev/mapper/raiddevice_name and the size shown from cat /proc/partitions to
determine your /, /home, and /boot and any other partitions you need to
setup in your chroot.
(5) mount all dm-X devices or /dev/mapper devices under /mnt to create your
actual filesystem, and then bind dev/, proc/ and sys/ to their respective mount
points
