hi

i have a RAID 1 system with 2 drives: /dev/sdb1 and /dev/sdc1. I use MDADM to create the raid 1 named /dev/md0. I have lot of data there. The problem is that i was re-installing system and from the live cd i executed a:
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1
mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdc1

then installed Ubuntu again wihtout formating those drives because my system is installed in /dev/sda

the problem is that when i try to re-create the raid and mount it, it does not contain any file. i did this more time before and always worked BUT never used the mkfs.ext3 (that was a mistake). anyhow knows how to recover data or fix the problem?

thanks in advance
trivet

You shouldn't do the mkfs.ext3 on the individual components (/dev/sdb and /dev/sdc) but rather on the RAID device itself, /dev/md0.

You likely lost your data because you overwrote superblock information.

POSSIBLY (haven't tried it) you might be able to recover your data by running "e2fsck -f /dev/md0". This assumes /dev/md0 was a filesystem before. TRY IT AT YOUR OWN RISK!!!

I doubt the issue here was whether you were using ext3 as opposed to any other filesystem but rather that you wrote on a component instead of on the raid device as a whole.

hi

i tried but no luck
no idea what else try

i can create the RAID and also to mount it but i only see the lost+found directory

what is excatly what i lost?? inode? superblock? what is mkfs.ext3 modifying in the partition when i execute mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1? is there a way recover old partition because i think problem here is that i overwrite RAID /dev/sdb1 partition with a new one when executing mkfs.ext3.

regards