gvinum raid5 cannot find file system superblock after removing a disk

[Ulf Lilleengen]

On Sat, Nov 10, 2007 at 10:31:32AM -0700, Edward Sutton wrote:
> 
> I had a disk that had been in a down state in the past, marking its raid5 plexes as stale. After determining which disk was the one connected to the stale data (ad8), I rebooted to a freebsd on a nonraided freebsd drive that did not have geom_gvinum loaded. I made a dd of the first 64mb on ad8 and used sysinstall to repartition the drive. The main system has failed to mount or fsck all raid5 partitions since. gvinum still says the untouched pieces are in the 'up' state and restoring my ad8 dd made that disk listed again but still cannot boot. I have not yet tried to rebuild the disk from the other 2 since it is unable to boot from them. Is there a chance that the daya is no longer being called with the 
> correct offset or from the correct disk? is there a way i can experiment with the data from each disk to rebuild it using different orders and offsets to create another disk containing nonstriped data to try to find the filesystems?
> I am running a stable6 system updated about 3 days ago and haven't found any postings indicating trouble from there. Any information as to what went wrong and suggested steps from here to bring this data back online would be greatly appreciated. I will try to provide any requested information, but at present wukk be manually copying it fro one computer to the next in most cases.
> Thanks again for any information,
Hi,

Your description was a bit hard to understand, so please post a more detailed
description of what you did, because all I got out from this was:

1) You have a RAID-5 volume, and ad8 fails.
2) You dd'ed the first 64 mb of ad8...  
3) You tried to repartition ad8... and then what? did you try rebuildparity?

Could you also please post your gvinum configuration (gvinum printconfig) and
listing (gvinum list)?

-- 
Ulf Lilleengen