Guys, I have an older openSuSE box (11.0 i586) that serves as a backoffice fax server (hylafax/avantfax) that no longer boots due to a mdraid failure. At first I thought it would be a simple hardware drive failure where I could simply fail the drive, remove it from the array, replace it, and then rebuild, but that is not the case. I have poked around a bit, and it looks like the disk hardware is fine, but for some reason the bitmap file and superblock for the array cannot be found. I have copied the boot message from the screen and it is shown below: (booting fallback image) md: raid0 personality registered for level 0 xor: measuring software checksum speed <snip> xor: using function: p5_max (2935.000 MB/sec) async_tx: api initialized (sync-only) <snip> md: raid6 personality registered for level 6 md: raid5 personality registered for level 5 md: raid4 personality registered for level 4 md: md1 stopped. md: bind (sdb5) md: bind (sda5) md: md1 array is not clean -- starting background reconstruction raid1: raid set md1 active with 2 out of 2 mirrors md1: bitmap file is out of date (148 < 149) -- forcing full recovery md1: bitmap file is out of date, doing full recovery md1: bitmap initialization failed: -5 md1: failed to create bitmap (-5) md: pers->run() failed ... mdadm: failed to RUN_ARRAY /dev/md1: Input/Output error mdadm: device /dev/md1 already active - cannot assemble it Waiting for device /dev/md1 to appear: ok /dev/md1: unknown volume type invalid root filesystem -- exiting to /bin/sh $ The output from the normal boot image is the same aside from trying resume=/dev/sdb5 which fails. What is the best approach to attempt to correct the mdraid problem, or ignoring the raid issue, how do I recover the partitions from the disks? Attempting a normal mount (ro) from the recovery console fails due to unknown filesystem type (filesystem_raid) (I didn't catch the exact message). But that makes since, all the partitions are of type 'fd' 'Linux raid autodetect'. cat /proc/mdstat shows both disks used in the md1 array, but it doesn't know what personality it is. Manually attempting to mount /dev/md1 mount complains about unknown filesystem and unable to find superblock information. That just sounds bad... I don't know, but assume that reboot that produced the error was caused by a power outage where power was on and off several times long enough to exhaust the UPS. But that has happened numerous times and there has never been an issue on reboot. The big question is how to approach data recovery? Favorite links or tools? I have a write-up or two squirreled away somewhere from years past about dd/dd_rescue for copying the partitions, but I haven't done this on a md array before. Any help, or suggestions will be much appreciated. -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org