Hi there,

The other day I turned on my machine and it refused to boot. Eventually is asked me to manually run fsck. I did this and to an extent blindly hit YES when prompted. I was kinda desperate to retreive data from the drive as my last backup was three days previous.

Any way this worked and the machine booted. However there was some damage most of which is in the init.d folder:

1/. apache2 doesn't start up automatically (apache2 -k start gets it going)
2/. ssh doesn't start
3/. gnome and xserver don't start (I have to login at the prompt and type startx)

I've tried reinstalling the relevant packages - this doesn't help. How can I get my machine back into its original state?

Finally, had I been using a RAID 0+1 or RAID 5 would I have been saved from this problem? I understand that had on of the drives completely failed in the array I could just swap it out. However if the drive suffers a minor issue such as some bad blocks etc would the RAID array saved me from these problems?

Thank you in advance...

Rob

A RAID will not stop file-system corruption. You can get around physical
problems of ONE drive (if you have a a RAID5 over 3). If your machine powers
off during a write there's still going to be some data loss (specially if
you keep on using ext2). Consider using RAID and a journaling file-system
(e.g. Reiser, Xfs or ext3).


Cheers,
Tink

I followed a tutorial and it mentioned that the root directory volume should use RAID 5 but rather RAID 1. It then said that RAID 5 should be used for directories containing data (/home)

Now going back to what happened to me last week, the corruption occured to a physical problem with the drive in the root volume, /etc/init.d would this set up ( RAID 1 on / ) have saved my machine from damage?

BTW - any idea how I can get my machine working properly again?

Thanks,

Rob