Radi 5 Drama

Hi all,

My Raid 5 fell over. :( Have been trying to recover it with no luck. Here is my setup and what i have done.

Linux, software raid5. Seven SATA drives in the array (the 8th drive was supposed to be a hot-spare, but it didn't get properly initialized into the array). Had one drive fail, and was rebuilding after a power reset. Had a second drive dump while the first was still rebuilding. After another reboot, mdadm tells me that the two 'failed' drives are now spares, and it can't start the array with only 5 drives.

Best info I could find to begin recovery at this point is to use 'mdadm --create --assume-clean' to rebuild the array and recreate the superblocks. I've tried this on all 7 drives, plus I tried in degraded mode cutting out one, then the other of the two bad drives. In every case, /proc/mdstat claims the array is back online, but attempts to mount the array give me a "group descriptors corrupted" error.

I'm not sure what else I can try without fear of completely mucking up my chances of a data recovery. I've got about 900GB of data on the array (most of which is just downloads though), and it would certainly be nice to get it back up again.


Many thanks in advance,

Julian



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