Hardware RAID1 failure in Fedora 12

[grendell]

Sorry if this has been answered elsewhere, but I didn't find anything in my forum searches.

I have been running Fedora 12 since its release without issue with a hardware RAID1 of two 1.5TB drives and a root volume of 500GB on a separate drive. Last night, after rebooting my machine, I was greeted with the following:

Checking filesystems
fsck.ext4: Unable to resolve 'UUID=<snip>78' [FAILED]

and the option of shell access as root. After logging in, I ran blkid with these results:

/dev/sda: TYPE="jmicron_raid_member"
/dev/sdb: TYPE="jmicron_raid_member"
/dev/sdc1: UUID="<snip>86" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sdc2: UUID="<snip>e7" TYPE="swap"

and cat /etc/fstab:

UUID=<snip>86 / ext4 defaults 1 1
UUID=<snip>78 /storage ext4 defaults 1 2
UUID=<snip>e7 swap swap defaults 0 0

I take this to mean that when mounting volumes, it can't find my RAID1, but I have no idea where to go from here. I've double-checked all the harddrive connections in my machine, and it feels like all three drives spin up upon boot. The RAID setup accessible at boot still sees both drives and reports no issues. I tried to boot from the Fedora 12 disc and recover, but the only options it gave me were to ignore the problem or format the drives.

Can anyone tell me if there are more commands I could try? If not, how should I go about replacing this disk? I assume that setting up a new disk would be the responsibility of the RAID, not Fedora, but I feel completely clueless at this point.

Hopefully I have given enough information about my situation (and done so clearly!). Thanks in advance for any help. I really appreciate it.

[Evil-I]

Hi There,

Not sure I can help you on the linux side as I'm still a bit of a noob there, I had loads of problems with hardware raid on cheaper chipsets on F12 to the point I gave up (by cheap i mean on board ICHR9 etc rather than true hardware RAID like 3Ware/ LSI etc). It might however be worth downloading one of the hard drive manufacturers drive test utilities. Usually they have downloadable iso's that can be written to CD to give a bootable test utility that is completely separate to your install. At least then you can prove the hard drives are okay first before digging deeper.

Each hard drive manufacturer has their own utility and it's best to run the manufacturer specific one if possible. If not Seagate's seatools gives you basic diagnostics on all manufacturers drives.

Just for your info, F13 is considerably better for on board raid (so called bios assisted software RAID), it's got an advanced storage setup tab during the install process that allows setup of on board RAID and it just works! Highly recommended if you have dual boot Linux/ Windows like I do and want to use your on board RAID.

Best wishes,

E-I

P.S. be reasonably careful with the drive test utilities because there are options like low level formatting which will lose all your data if you chose them by accident.

[droidhacker]

I'm afraid that jmicron is ***NOT*** hardware raid!
It is FAKERAID.
That means that it is a SOFTWARE RAID that is designed to ***LOOK*** like hardware raid (fake hardware raid).

Now a RAID1 is actually a MIRRORED raid set.
If it was a proper hardware raid, you would be able to access the array from either disk or the other, but since the bottom of the disk is polluted with the jmicron fakeraid metadata, this is not going to be the case for you.

You are going to have to look at the "dmraid" command, since this is the control command for the dmraid driver, which is responsible for implementing fakeraid functionality using the device mapper.

When the array is mapped, you will find the device files for it located in /dev/mapper/

Next time think twice about using fakeraid.

Originally Posted by grendell

Sorry if this has been answered elsewhere, but I didn't find anything in my forum searches.

I have been running Fedora 12 since its release without issue with a hardware RAID1 of two 1.5TB drives and a root volume of 500GB on a separate drive. Last night, after rebooting my machine, I was greeted with the following:

Checking filesystems
fsck.ext4: Unable to resolve 'UUID=<snip>78' [FAILED]

and the option of shell access as root. After logging in, I ran blkid with these results:

/dev/sda: TYPE="jmicron_raid_member"
/dev/sdb: TYPE="jmicron_raid_member"
/dev/sdc1: UUID="<snip>86" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sdc2: UUID="<snip>e7" TYPE="swap"

and cat /etc/fstab:

UUID=<snip>86 / ext4 defaults 1 1
UUID=<snip>78 /storage ext4 defaults 1 2
UUID=<snip>e7 swap swap defaults 0 0

I take this to mean that when mounting volumes, it can't find my RAID1, but I have no idea where to go from here. I've double-checked all the harddrive connections in my machine, and it feels like all three drives spin up upon boot. The RAID setup accessible at boot still sees both drives and reports no issues. I tried to boot from the Fedora 12 disc and recover, but the only options it gave me were to ignore the problem or format the drives.

Can anyone tell me if there are more commands I could try? If not, how should I go about replacing this disk? I assume that setting up a new disk would be the responsibility of the RAID, not Fedora, but I feel completely clueless at this point.

Hopefully I have given enough information about my situation (and done so clearly!). Thanks in advance for any help. I really appreciate it.

[Evil-I]

Originally Posted by droidhacker

Next time think twice about using fakeraid.

I'm afraid droidhacker is right. On board RAID is NOT to be mistaken for proper RAID hardware. If you want it for redundancy to have a mirror of your drives, then I'd either go true hardware raid or just do manual data backups between drives.

I do use my on board Intel ICHR raid on my main desktop, but in RAID0 for performance. I'm not too worried about it failing as all my data is backed up to my home file server that does have a proper 3ware hardware raid controller running raid5 and a hot spare.

Good luck my friend recovering what you are after, I've had similar issues with this sort of raid problem and I've never really made sense of it. As mentioned in my last post it might be worth checking out f13 for its improved management of these types of raid, but I still wouldn't bet importnat data on mirroring using one of these in Linux or Windows for that matter.

Best,

E-I

[grendell]

Thank you both for your responses. I apologize for being misinformed about my RAID.

dmraid -r gives the following:
/dev/sdb: jmicron, "jmicron_RAID", mirror, ok, 2930245632 sectors, data@ 0
/dev/sda: jmicron, "jmicron_RAID", mirror, ok, 2930245632 sectors, data@ 0

dmraid -ay -v gives the following:
ERROR: dos: partition address past end of RAID device

According to fdisk -l /dev/mapper/jmicron_RAID, it has a W95 FAT32 file system, when it should be ext4. /dev/sda1 is also reporting as FAT32, but /dev/sdb1 is ext4. I assume this means that /dev/sda has bit the dust, but /dev/sdb should still be valid.

Is there any way to mount /dev/sdb1 to confirm that my data still exists, before I purchase another drive and attempt a dmraid -R rebuild? Any other advisement? Thanks again for your assistance.