[wplug] unidentified partitioning problems

[Jonathan Billings]

On Oct 29, 2006, at 12:12 AM, Logan wrote:

> So something odd happened, and my computer no longer boots,  
> something about can't find init, and a bunch of errors.

When you see this, in most cases, it means that the kernel can't find  
the root disk, to run /sbin/init.

> Something vaguely similar happened before. Last time I used the  
> Debian install disk and went part of the way through a new install,  
> and it recognized my software RAID and everything worked fine.
>
> This time it recognized the boot partition, and all the individual  
> RAID parts on all the disks, but not the overall software RAID  
> devise. I believe it's EXT3, is there anything I can do to recover  
> the data?

If you still have an install disk handy, hopefully you also have a  
rescue disk handy too.  A lost of distros have rescue mode built into  
the install disks, although I'm not positive about debian.  If not,  
you can use a Knoppix CD to boot into an OS, then try to debug the  
software raid.

Recovering the data depends on what kind of RAID you have and what  
kind of failure occured.  If it's RAID 1, and one of the disks is  
dead or has a lot of dead sectors, you can simply mount the other  
slice as a disk.  RAID 0 or 5 will require rebuilding the disk, or  
possibly restoring from backups, depending on how many parts are  
dead.  It sounds like all the parts are recognized, so it might just  
be a minor configuration problem.  It's hard to diagnose without more  
info, so I think booting off another OS will be the best way to go  
from here.
--
Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org>