DMRAID Issues

[sylathnie]

I keep all of my important data on a fakeraid. After an upgrade to 10.04 from 9.10 I am having trouble re-mounting the drives. I've recreated and destroyed the array numerous times with various different names but the same problem always occurs.

----@----:/dev/mapper$ ls
control jmicron_DataArray    ? jmicron_DataArray________
----@----:/dev/mapper$ dir
control jmicron_DataArray\ \ \ \ \ \ \ \001 jmicron_DataArray________
----@----:/dev/mapper$

As you can see there are some challenges to mounting either one of those device names. Anyone have any tips to either successfully rename the devices or to keep all those extra characters from being tacked on?

[Snowhog]

Re: DMRAID Issues

Why do you have so many spaces in the array names?! :P

I'm no DMRAID guru - as far from it as I can be. But, can you rename these drives so as not to have any spaces in their names?

[sylathnie]

Re: DMRAID Issues

And here-in is the problem. I didn't put the spaces there! I don't know how to make them go away.

I even tried using the maximum number of characters for the array name and it still adds an extra \001 to the end.

[sylathnie]

Re: DMRAID Issues

Anyone else have any hints?

[oshunluvr]

Re: DMRAID Issues

what about mounting wihtout using dev names

I can mount my mdadm raid devices using UUID or label. Have you tried either of those?

[sylathnie]

Re: DMRAID Issues

Both the name and the UUID include the strange acsii character as well. Thanks though!

[oshunluvr]

Re: DMRAID Issues

Really? That's weird - I've never seen a UUID with anything but hexadecimal numbers.

Does anything show up in your log files when you start dmraid -ay ?

What's the output of dmraid -s ?

[sylathnie]

Re: DMRAID Issues

I'm not sure where the logs are for that. Any tips on where I should look?

*** Active Set
name  : jmicron_DataArray    
size  : 1953497088
stride : 2
type  : mirror
status : ok
subsets: 0
devs  : 2
spares : 0

[oshunluvr]

Re: DMRAID Issues

All logs are kept in /var/log.

You might try assembling the array, note the time, and then browse the directory to see which if any log files have new entries.

What if your install has something wrong or a trashed cache file that's causing this?

Have you tried booting to the livecd, installing dmraid, and assembling then - just to see if it's something other than the partitions themselves?

[davemc]

Re: DMRAID Issues

You say you've destroyed and recreated the array numerous times. Can you post the command you use to create your array. Maybe there's something dodgy in that.

Something normal would be

mdadm --create /dev/md0 --level=1 --name=SomeDataArray --raid-devices=2 /dev/sda2 /dev/sdb2

[sylathnie]

Re: DMRAID Issues

I only see on entry in the logs when I run the command and it relates to a successful authentication with the sudo command. I will give the live CD thing a try this weekend.

The command to "create" the array is performed within the controller BIOS itself. I use the command:

dmraid -ay

to activate the array. I have tried numerous different array names within the BIOS, both short and maximum length.

This was completely functional in 9.10. I could create\destroy\access the array with no problems. When I did the in place upgrade the problem appeared.

[oshunluvr]

Re: DMRAID Issues

This isn't a fix but do you have enough hard drive space to move the file off of your raid? You could mount the raid using the Karmic livecd, copy the files off, boot back to lucid, create a mdadm raid instead.

[sylathnie]

Re: DMRAID Issues

Well I finally found a fix. Not the ideal fix but it worked.
Boot to Windows OS.
Run motherboard software associated with RAID.
Rename array.
Boot back to Linux
Run testdisk to recover and re-create ntfs partition.
Remount array.
Cheer!
Swear because I had to use Windows.

All data restored and functionality restored.

[oshunluvr]

Re: DMRAID Issues

well thank goodness you found a solution!