Hello

I'm trying to set up a RAID 10 server using software RAID.

I have made 2 RAID 1 partitions (md2 and md3) and have then stripped these into md4.

I then made the filesystem on md4:
mkfs.ext3 /dev/md4

However, I would like to know how one would recover from this sort of file system.

If I boot up with a live CD and try to mount any of the partitions which are involved in the RAID 0 file system, I just get errors asking to input the filesystem. If I input ext3, then I get told that it is the wrong file type.

When I make regular RAID 1 partitons, I can mount each one individually with a live CD. I would like to be able to do this, even though the RAID 1 partitions are stripped together.

Can anyone tell me if this is possible. Otherwise, what are my other options for recovering RAID 10?

thank you in advance
Hamish

It seems that I can remove hard drives which are in md2 and md3 and the md4 partition will remain unaffected. Also, I can then hot add them.

However, this means that I can only recover data if I have the system. If the entire system breaks and I have no bootable systems, there would be no way to recover the data.

Hamish