Best way to recover file off of single RAID1 drive?

ddc441 · 02-24-2009, 05:38 PM

I had two WD SE16 640GB drives set up as RAID1 with a 400GB partition, a 240GB partition and a swap part. Fedora 9 OS ext3 file system.

Messing around I screwed up the Fedora pretty good. No problem. I'll just take out one of the drives, reformat it, and install Fedora 10. Then I'll just plug the second drive into my Vista machine and copy the /home files via LAN back to the Fedora 10 box.

Step 1. Reformat and install Fedora 10. No problems -

Part 2. I plugged the second drive into a Vista machine, installed "read ext3" software, and looked at the drive.

Problem! The system sees the partitions, but thinks this is a "damaged" raid disk. I suppose it is because the mirror is missing. But the data on the drive is complete. I just need to be able to access it and copy the /home folder to the new install.

I'm hesitant to plug it back into the Fedora box because I'm pretty clueless about mounting devices and partitions and so forth. I wiped out a backup drive before trying to mount it on a new install to recover data.

What's the best way to get those /home files off of a single RAID1 drive that isn't damaged?

Thanks!

mostlyharmless · 02-24-2009, 05:42 PM

Mount the raid using mdadm with the "missing" parameter instead of the fellow disk. Unfortunately you will have to learn how to do that. It really isn't that hard and we'll be happy to walk you through it.

I wouldn't touch that RAID disk with Vista and expect to get your data back.

FragInHell · 02-24-2009, 06:41 PM

Sounds like your trying to mount a Broken Raid device with an ext3 partition on Vista, not sure thats going to work for you.
You'll need to mount it in linux telling the Raid driver that its a broken mirror, then you should be able to mount the filesystem.

ddc441 · 02-24-2009, 07:14 PM

I forgot to mention that it was hardware RAID using Intel ICH9R chip... not a software linux RAID. I assume that makes a difference.

Thanks!

Quakeboy02 · 02-24-2009, 07:59 PM

If it's a RAID1, you should be able to just access it directly. Try mounting readonly and see if it works.

ddc441 · 02-24-2009, 08:11 PM

Wow... turned out to be a lot simplier than I thought. I just went into the bios, disabled raid and the system booted right up to Fedora 10. I logged in as root, startx, and there it was on the desktop... just like a cdrom.

Thanks for all your help. You gave me the confidence to plug it back into the linux box and fire it up.

Thanks!