Is there a way to make the computer boot again with a possible corrupted gm drive

[Mike Meyer]

In <20070405222630.83665.qmail at web54102.mail.re2.yahoo.com>, Xi Liu <xliu99 at yahoo.com> typed:
> I was able to mount one of the SATA drive (which is
> part of the gmirror drive), and copy some data files
> to another IDE drive (bootable). But I can not copy
> some data files, there was error being printed out
> that says sth. like "...UNRECOVERABLE....",

> Hopefully, the data files I was able to copy is
> complete.
> 
> The gmirror drive consists of two SATA drives. That I
> usally boot from this gmirror drive. Do you know if I
> can restore/rebuild the complete gmirror drive? If
> Yes, can you please point to me some instructions?
> That can save me lots of time/trouble to
> reinstall/reconfigure the whole system

No, I don't know if you can restore/rebuild it, because I don't know
how badly it's broken. If all the drives are dead, you're out of
luck. Normally, only one of the drives in a mirror has problems. So
try mounting the other drives and see if how they work. If one of them
is fine, then you can just mount it and and a replacement for the dead
drives, and the system will automatically rebuild the mirror on the
new drives. If all of the drives have problems (I've never had that
happen), then you have multiple broken drives to try and recover the
data from, meaning you're more likely to be able to get everything
back.

Whatever you do, *do not* write on the drives! If the data is truly
valuable, there are services that specialize in extracting data from
dead drives. Writing anything at all to the drive makes their work
harder. However, they are expensive.

	<mike
-- 
Mike Meyer <mwm at mired.org>		http://www.mired.org/consulting.html
Independent Network/Unix/Perforce consultant, email for more information.