-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: F10+dmraid eats puppies! (and ate my system too) Date: Sat, 13 Dec 2008 22:50:32 -0800 From: Graham TerMarsch <fedora@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Organization: Howling Frog Internet Development, Inc. To: fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx CC: Robert L Cochran <cochranb@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> References: <200812130004.01919.fedora@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> <4943AB2A.5000607@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On December 13, 2008, Robert L Cochran wrote: > 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. Agreed, there are a multitude of different ways that I could have approached this that might have prevented loss of data. Fortunately, once I figured out what had happened I was able to mount both sda and sdb individually and get the files off that I needed. As for copying my system to a set of spare drives, its not like I (or likely too many other people here) just have a set of spare drives kicking around with a few hundred GB of empty space on them, "just in case" of emergency. Sounds great, but in practice What I want to emphasize from my initial post, though, was that its entirely possible for someone to get into this funky state and to have data loss and/or mirror failure without actually doing anything unusual. The F10 installed told me that it was installing onto the nvidia dmraid setup that I had, and thus I expected that as a result that when it was done that I'd actually be running on that dmraid setup (or that it'd at least throw some sort of message to indicate that it *wasn't*). Instead, though, I ended up running on bare sda. IMO, anyone who had a dmraid setup and that has since upgraded to F10 could now very likely be just as hosed as I was. Even if they don't get the behaviour of swapping from sda to sdb, they're still running *without* the dmraid that they were led to believe that they installed in/on. -- Graham TerMarsch Generally, if the data is worth saving, then it is worth backing up, too. If the data is worth saving from a possibly bad disk, image it to a second known-good hard drive and perform recovery work on the second drive, never the original. That way you can try again if your first attempts at recovery don't work. Hard drives are really cheap to get these days. So it is reasonable to keep at least one or more external drives that have backups of your data. Keeping a few known-good "scratch" drives around can really save the day sometimes. Western Digital makes an entire business out of supplying MyBook and MyPassport drives for this very purpose. It is also easy to put an internal drive in an external hard drive enclosure which uses USB and plug it in. I don't consider this to be expensive at all -- indeed if you shop around you can pick up great hard drives quite cheaply. -- fedora-list mailing list fedora-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-list Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Communicate/MailingListGuidelines
