0

I have a blade server on Rocky Linux 8 with 5 18TB WD Gold HDDs in a software RAID0 built with mdadm. I will accept all the lectures on this and change my ways if you all can help. I needed coffee while I was investigating what appeared to be an empty HD slot (the LED was off) and I popped out one of the drives in the RAID. I quickly put it back in and did a reboot.. to find that I am booting into emergency mode.

Emergency mode

The /var/log/messages file indicates that the NTFS filesystem on the RAID is unavailable, and the system cannot open the RAID component /dev/sde. Checking fdisk also reports that the backup GPT table is not on the end of dev/sdf.

cat /var/log/messages fdisk -l

The output of cat /proc/mdstat shows the following configuration. I recall that I had md126 and md127 mounted. However, md127 shows status inactive. cat /proc/mdstat

When I examine /dev/md127 with mdadm, it gives the following output: mdadm --examine /dev/md127

I haven't taken any steps to resolve the issue as I would like to understand what happened first. I am concerned about losing the data, but not concerned enough to pay for data recovery. I just don't know enough about RAID and particularly software RAID to feel confident taking action. So how bad is this and what is the safest way to proceed?

EDIT: I see the title of this post has been edited by a user from "Temporary disconnect of HDD in RAID 0 array" to "Destroyed RAID 0 array". Is the RAID definitely destroyed? Any insights would be appreciated.

2
  • Best way is to create an image of all disks that are part of the array. Usually I save them as an image on a BTRFS or ZFS volume that has ZSTD compression, take a snapshot and then try to recover the data from the snapshoted images. Mar 30, 2023 at 3:47
  • 2
    it's against all standard ways to run a raid 0 without a backup. no business related environmental will run like this, do basically offtopic. If the data are really important contract some kind of data restore professional
    – djdomi
    Mar 30, 2023 at 6:11

1 Answer 1

0

Well, this story has a happy ending!

After using ddrescue to copy all of the 18Tb disks, I used the ntfs equivalent of fsck (ntfsfix) on /dev/md0. The utility was able to restore the filesystem and all of the data has been recovered.

In the first hours of this post, a mod changed the title from "Temporary disconnect of HDD in RAID 0 array" to "Destroyed RAID 0 array and no backups". As it turns out, that was not the case. I have now restored the original title of the post.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .