I just got a call from a buddy down in central america, apparantly some people he was working with had an old machine that lost the OS drive, but the data partitions were still there, so he rebuilt the os to find that they had a RAID 5 config on the other 3 drives. I haven't had much experience with software raid on linux so I told him i would ask around on how to fix this. Is there a way to reclaim that metadevice even though the OS drive (holding the info) was lost to failure? I am not really thinking there is but I had to ask. thanks for any help, google and other searches have turned up nothing so far.

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~p...x/raidextract/

You do need the RAID metadata. But you could treat it as a broken RAID and use recovery tools.

Excellent, I will forward off this data to him, I will try to let you all know the outcome.

Simon,

Is it not enough to just remount the array? I'm not trying to be obtuse, or to muddy the water. I'm still newbie in this, but am trying to be pedantic in my self-education (thank you for the new word!).

The reason I'm asking is because I had a 4 drive RAID5 array with a separate OS drive. I wiped out the OS drive & did a clean install (like recovering from a physically crashed OS drive - doing an OS install on it's own drive & then re-attaching the data drives), and then reassembled the raid array and remounted it at the same point. Is that [mount point, drive order, etc.] the metadata to which you're referring?

Try it and find out. Note - drphat indicated that the metadata for the array was on a different drive. If it was just the mount info then, yeah ... the whole point is supposed to be that the parity data is across all the disks.

"pedantic" a new word? That's "conquering", surely, or, possibly, "googling"? I have heard things about Texas education but I never thought... Hmmm... San Antonio, I know that one, it's where the Alamo is! You guys are supposed to have the best Mexican food - but I've never been. Now I'm OT...