Unable to mount additional harddrive from a RAID volume system.
 

Hi,

I believe server section is the best when speaking of RAID stuff...

I have the following situation:

We have a DELL T3400 with embedded fake raid on it. I dont know exactly how the system was setup (I wasnt here at that time), but the RAID was enabled in bios and while booting, the two harddrives would be seen as members of intel raid volume0 (RAID 1 mirror). I am not sure if the software raid was actually properly configured in Linux (Fedora 9) and if the OS was reconstructing the whole raid or it was just the bios part that was mirroring the /boot or just some parts of it. Frankly I find these hydrid raids very confusing.

Some bad disk manipulation from my part caused the server to crash, but I was able to recover and boot just with one hard drive after using fsck.

I decided to get rid of the raid as it's not the right solution for the application we need it for and decided to go for a traditional single harddrive system and to use Ghost for Linux to clone to a spare disk when backups are needed.

So I installed the latest Fedora 12 distribution onto another harddrive and disabled RAID in bios (changed from RAID ON to autodetect, which is the only other option).

Here is what I have now:
/dev/sda has the newly installed fedora 12
/dev/sdb is an empty harddrive that I would use as an intermediate
/dev/sdc is the old harddrive member of intel raid volume0

sdb was partitioned into sdb1 sdb2 and sdb3 and I created an ext3 filesystem on sdb2.

The hard drive belonging to RAID volume0 (sdc) has a lot of work done on it and I would like to be able to recuperate the files to the new disk (sda). I cannot mount that old harddrive while in fedora 12, as it sees some unknown raid member filesystem on it probably assigned by the intel raid chip.

So I decided to do it from the other side: to boot from raid volume 0, and from there mount a third intermediate harddrive (sdb) onto which I would copy the documents and then mount the same harddrive from the newly installed fedora 12 and copy those documents from that intermediate harddrive.

I can mount /dev/sdb2 from fedora 12 fine and copy stuff to and from it, but not when I boot from the RAID volume 0 harddrive (sdc) with fedora 9 on it. It keeps saying that the partition in question (/dev/sdb2) is an invalid block device.

I am stuck here, as my knowledge in this sort of things is very limited.

If somebody can indicate me how to recuperate files from that old raid harddrive onto the new fedora 12 drive, I would appreciate a lot.

PS: If any additional information is needed, I will gladly provide it.

Hi andrei_r20,

Why not simply plug in an external disk to the original os (sdc) or rsync to another box, or backup to tape, ...

It looks like you are desperate to copy from one disk in the system to another which is indeed quicker, if that's what you're after but seems to be a problem for some reason.

Honestly, considering you say yourself that you have limited knowledge of RAIDs. I'd be very careful playing with the disks until you have a serious backup somewhere else.

Good luck.

yeah, I finally rsynced to another box via nfs.. the problem is that i had to "make that other box"...

I'm glad to hear it worked out. I'm doing the same today :\