Re: xfs_repair of critical volume

Eli Morris
2010-11-01T03:39:10Z

On Oct 31, 2010, at 1:40 PM, Emmanuel Florac wrote:

> Le Sun, 31 Oct 2010 12:56:33 -0700 vous écriviez:
>
>> OK, that's a long tale of woe. Thanks for any advise.
>
> oK, so what we'd like to do is get the backup RAID volume back in
> working order. You said it's made of 2TB Caviar green drives, but
> didn't mention the RAID controller type... As I understand it, you
> power-cycled the RAID array, so the cache is gone, whatever have been
> in it...
>
> All arrays I know will happily reassemble a working RAID if you
> succesfully revive the failed drives.
>
> Logically the failed drives are almost certainly not really dead, but
> in a temporary failure state mode. First, you must check WD support and
> utilities to see if something may apply to your configuration. Anyway,
> checking the failed drives' health with the western digital disk
> utility should allow you to determine if they're toast or not.
>
> In the case they're not actually dead, you could try to revive the
> badblocks with Spinrite (www.grc.com), it saved my life a couple of
> times, however it's quite risky when used with SMART-tripped drives.
>
> --
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Emmanuel Florac | Direction technique
> | Intellique
> | <eflorac@intellique.com>
> | +33 1 78 94 84 02
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi,

Thanks for your help. The RAID is a SCSI connected direct attached storage 16 bay unit made by Maxtronic. It is a Janus 6640, is case that helps anything. At the time of its problem, it was mounted read-only as I was trying to be careful of the data, since the main volume failed and this was our only copy. So maybe the cache isn't a big deal. I'll try the "dead" drives tomorrow with a WD utility. I'll give Spinrite a try, if the WD utility doesn't revive them.

thanks a lot for the help. I'll let you all know how things go.

Eli