VINUM: Disk crash with striped raid

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Thursday,  7 October 2004 at 18:11:52 +0200, Paul Everlund wrote:
> Hi Greg and list!
>
> I did have two 120 GB's disk drives in vinum as a striped raid.

Can you be more specific?

> One disk crashed, and is not found during boot. It starts up and
> makes the usual noises, but then it stalls with a katjing, katjing
> and so on. It seems like either the steering electronics, or the
> read/write-heads mechanics, have failed.
>
> I did contact a data recovery company and they say they need both
> disks to restore the raid, because of that the raid initializing
> might be corrupted.
>
> My questions is:
>
> Do they need both disks?

That depends on your configuration.

> Isn't it enough if they make a disk image of the failed drive, and I
> will then be able to restore the raid data initialization in vinum
> by a vinum create, or something similar?

The command will be 'vinum start'.

> Will they be able to recreate the raid data without using vinum
> anyway?

Who knows?

The real issue is the configuration of your volume (not "raid").  If
it only has a single plex, you're in trouble.  In that case, you need
your recovery company to get an image of the failed disk.  Then you
should put it on a similar disk, create a configuration entry and
perform some other incantations, and you should be up and running
again.

If you have two or more plexes, you shouldn't need to do any of this.

Greg
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