RAID5 volumes suddenly lost superblock and show weird hexdump patterns

RAID5 volumes suddenly lost superblock and show weird hexdump patterns

[estr4ng3d]

I got some of my RAID5 array volumes damaged. I have no idea what happened, I
was simply trying to manually assemble them after a reboot, only to discover
they are no longer recognized by mdadm as containing a superblock.

What's interesting and really weird (to my humble knowledge at least) is
that hexdumps show interesting patterns. http://pastebin.com/m494e69c0
Obviously far from being random garbage (hence I'm ruling out media damage).
Does RAID create this sort of data sequences as part of its operation? Could
this have been deliberate overwriting of my volumes?

I'm desperately trying to recover data on this array. Any help/pointers
appreciated!

Thanks
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Re: RAID5 volumes suddenly lost superblock and show weird hexdump patterns

[Goswin von Brederlow]

estr4ng3d <e5tr4ng3d@yahoo.com> writes:

> I got some of my RAID5 array volumes damaged. I have no idea what happened, I
> was simply trying to manually assemble them after a reboot, only to discover
> they are no longer recognized by mdadm as containing a superblock.
>
> What's interesting and really weird (to my humble knowledge at least) is
> that hexdumps show interesting patterns. http://pastebin.com/m494e69c0
> Obviously far from being random garbage (hence I'm ruling out media damage).
> Does RAID create this sort of data sequences as part of its operation? Could
> this have been deliberate overwriting of my volumes?
>
> I'm desperately trying to recover data on this array. Any help/pointers
> appreciated!
>
> Thanks

Looks more like you formated /dev/sda with ext2 instead of /dev/md0.

MfG
        Goswin