Re: assemble vs create an array.......

[David Chinner <dgc@sgi.com>]

On Thu, Dec 06, 2007 at 07:39:28PM +0300, Michael Tokarev wrote:
> What to do is to give repairfs a try for each permutation,
> but again without letting it to actually fix anything.
> Just run it in read-only mode and see which combination
> of drives gives less errors, or no fatal errors (there
> may be several similar combinations, with the same order
> of drives but with different drive "missing").

Ugggh. 

> It's sad that xfs refuses mount when "structure needs
> cleaning" - the best way here is to actually mount it
> and see how it looks like, instead of trying repair
> tools. 

It self protection - if you try to write to a corrupted filesystem,
you'll only make the corruption worse. Mounting involves log
recovery, which writes to the filesystem....

> Is there some option to force-mount it still
> (in readonly mode, knowing it may OOPs kernel etc)?

Sure you can: mount -o ro,norecovery <dev> <mtpt>

But it you hit corruption it will still shut down on you. If
the machine oopses then that is a bug.

> thread prompted me to think.  If I can't force-mount it
> (or browse it using other ways) as I can almost always
> do with (somewhat?) broken ext[23] just to examine things,
> maybe I'm trying it before it's mature enough? ;)

Hehe ;)

For maximum uber-XFS-guru points, learn to browse your filesystem
with xfs_db. :P

Cheers,

Dave.
-- 
Dave Chinner
Principal Engineer
SGI Australian Software Group