Well I figured it out, actually pretty simple once you realize what's
going on. To recover the RAID volumes I did the following:
Boot the linux distribution CD with the command "linux rescue" The
system didn't find any of my partitions which is what I expected.
next I used fdisk to partition the new disk and set the partition type
to be 0xdf (Linux Raid). Since the /boot partition was RAID-1 I just
had to simply format the new /boot partition as ext3 and copy the old to
the new with dump/restore, run grub to lay down a new boot loader etc.
The fun part now began, how to recreate the other partitions which were
stripped with RAID-5. After much looking around I found the command
mdadm which allows you to manipulate the RAID volumes. At this point I
verified my partitions with "mdadm --query /dev/sdbX" to make sure which
partition used to belong to which RAID volume. Once I positively
identified the remaining members of each group I then issued the command:
mdadm --assemble /dev/md1 /dev/sdb2 /dev/sdc2 /dev/sdd2
That would bring the volume up with 3 of the 4 volume members, I then
added the 4th member with the command:
mdadm /dev/md1 -a /dev/sda2
At this point the system would happily chug away rebuilding the missing
volume member.
I repeated the above for each of the raid volumes and at that point was
able to reload the system.
Jeff
I Wrote:
I have a new (experimental) system that I installed software raid with.
The system has 4 - identical 18GB SCSI disks and I installed the
partitions as follows:
/, /var, /usr, /home, and swap were made by carving out identical
partitions out of the 4 disks and set as raid 5 with no spares
The /boot partition was set raid 1 on the first two drives and set aside
partitions on the other two disks as spares.
Now I have failed my boot disk (SCSI ID 0) and I want to restore it,
copying over the /boot partition and telling grub to use it wasn't that
difficult, however I am at a loss to recover the other filesystems
without being able to load "/" the system panics at boot time.
What am I doing wrong? This is a FC5 install as it came off the CD's
Thanks, Jeff
