SUMMARY System Down - Adaptec raid failure

[Don Knott <dknott@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Sadly, I can report the same results as Michael J McCafferty:

Not one single response except for 4 out of office autoresponders.

When I first joined the list a few years ago it was a valuable resource. 
Now it looks to have withered. Thats a shame.

I found a partial solution to my problem. I was able to use a rescue CD to 
get the system booted to where I could see the remaining good drives.

http://www.sysresccd.org/

I salvaged what data I could but ended up rebuilding everything in /etc 
by hand.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 18:55:42 -0400 (EDT)
From: Don Knott <dknott@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: linuxmanagers@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: System Down - Adaptec raid failure

Hello-

I'm in fair bit of a pickle. One of my servers imploded on Friday. One of the 
disks in a mirror showed as failed and triggered the alarm on the Adaptec 2005s 
raid controller. In the past, I've been able to use raidutil aka dptutil to 
rebuild the mirror. If the drive broke the mirror again, I'd get a replacement 
and swap it out. Friday however, when I told the system to rebuild the mirror, 
it melted down and soon reached an unusable state where it locked up solid.

Fortunately the majority of the system is on tape and I can restore it. There 
are some files that ended up outside of the nightly backup routine that I'd 
like to recover if possible.

Currently the system is offline. I had a spare server that I brought up with 
the most critical services like dns, proxy and printing.

The dead box is Redhat v8 with an onboard Adaptec 2005s raid controller. There 
are six scsi disks. The first four are in a raid 10 setup and that is the array 
that is having trouble. It also happens to be the boot disks. The last two 
disks are in a mirror and they still report as good in the card bios.

The most important files are on the 2 disk mirror however I'd really like to 
get to /etc on the other disks if possible to help me in rebuilding my full 
dns, recover user accounts etc.

I've tried booting from a Redhat CD in rescue mode and giving it the dpt module 
from a floppy but it failed to find any linux partitions. I also tried a 
Knoppix CD but that didn't work either.

Any assistance is most appreciated.
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