Could you have used one or more of: dd, ddrescue, and Testdisk to copy your system to a set of spare drives and then work only on the spares until you had a clear idea of what was wrong? I think that would have gone a long way to sparing you from some data loss. Bob Cochran Graham TerMarsch wrote: > I ran into this earlier in the week and after finally getting my machine back > online am surprised to see that people aren't making a big stink about > this... its got subtle nuances that make it nearly impossible to fix without > loss of data. > > I've found the following threads/bugs that appear related: > > https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=474697 > http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=206206 > http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=206284 > > Here's what happened to me... > > I upgraded from F9 to F10 back on Nov 29th, and things seemed fine. I > upgraded the kernel last Wednesday, rebooted, and started seeing all sorts of > crazy weirdness. At first the system wouldn't boot at all, dying on errors > of "killing init" and "corrupted libraries". I thought it sounded like FS > corruption, so I booted the rescue CD, ran fsck (which came back clean), and > then proceeded to re-install some of the packages with the corrupted > libraries, so I could at least get the machine up and running again. > > After several cycles of "rescue CD, install packages, reboot, fail", I > decided that even if I could get it running I wasn't going to trust it. Went > back to the rescue CD, and started backing up files onto other machines on > the network here. > > I then re-installed the machine, leaving my "/home" and "/usr/local" > partitions as they were; reformatted everything else, but left those alone. > Got the system up, but was then presented with the most shocking thing... it > looked like my machine had basically done time-travel and was now *exactly* > as it was on November 29th. Files I know I'd edited were missing changes, e- > mails were lost, databases were missing data. > > Took me a while to figure it out, but here's what happened... > > When I upgraded from F9 to F10, Anaconda detected my nvidia dmraid mirror and > installed F10 onto both halves of the mirror. When I rebooted, though, it > only picked up *ONE HALF* of the mirror... /dev/sda. It had the UUIDs right, > but it didn't mount /device/mapper/nvidia_xxxx but mounted sda instead. When > I did the kernel upgrade this week, *that* mounted sdb. When I reinstalled, > it *also* mounted sdb, not sda or dmraid. > > When I looked at sda directly, I saw all of my recent changes to files that > I'd made since the 29th. When I looked at sdb directly, it was a snapshot of > what my machine looked like on the 29th. > > When we actually manage to get the bug fixed that caused this, anyone who's > had this problem is potentially going to be in for a bigger world of hurt > when applying the fix... I don't even think we can (with confidence) just > nuke one half of the mirror and rebuild based on whats on the other half; how > do we know which half they've been using? In my case, I'd made ~2wks of > changes to sda not knowing that I was only using half the mirror, and then > after updating the kernel got bumped over to sdb and made changes there while > trying to fix it. Neither one was a mirror of the other, and each one had > something on it that needed to be preserved. YUCK. > > Once I realized what'd happened to my machine I went into the BIOS and turned > off the nvidia fakeraid and re-installed directly onto the two drives. Isn't > what I want as I'd at least like to have _some_ mirror of my data somewhere, > but it was the only way I could get this machine running again. > > Be forewarned.... F10+dmraid is *DANGEROUS* right now... > > -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
