HELP Recover software RAID5...

I am hoping some brilliant sysadm can help me recover my software raid 5.
I was expanding the raid and the system lost power shortly after beginning
the raid expansion. Is there any way to recover/resume the process?

Let me start with a little history.

I built my new home server using Fedora 9. I replaced my Red Hat 7 server
that was built in 03 and served me well. The box has 2 500GB drives in a
raid 1 that server as my primary drive. I originally had 3 x 1GB drives in
a raid 5 that is my media drive. This drive is not backed up, but
everything on, except for a few recorded shows, comes from DVDs I own.

Over Time as the media drive was filled up, I add additional drives to the
raid. I shut the system down, physically installed the new drive and
powered back up. Next I created a raid partition on the new drive, added
it to the raid as a spare than told the raid to to expand on to the new
drive (waited a long time). The last time took more than 24 hours. Any
how after the reai was reformed, I resized the physical volume, then
resized the logical volume and magically the raid had grown by another GB!

I was feeling very good about myself until last night. I tried to add a
6th drive using the same technique as I had used fro the two previous
drives. Everything started out well. I go to the point where I told the
told the raid to expand:
mdadm -?grow /dev/md2 -?raid-devices=6

It started out fine, then I decided to push the system back into place and
go to bed. Well this is where things went wrong. I accidentally hit the
power switch on the back of the power supply. The system went silent an my
heart skipped a beat.

I powered the system back on and md2 did not mount. Now I am not an expert
sysadmin, I know enough to be dangerous, obviously, so I thought I should
get some help before making things worse, if that is possible.

md2 should consist of /dev/sdc1 - sdh1

The mdadm.conf still shows:
ARRAY /dev/md2 level=raid5 num-devices=5,/dev/sdh1 UUID=
4051e6d4:fbc112df:a86975d3:283d241f


Using mdadm --assemble --scan --verbose I get a lot of info but here are
what I think are the important parts:

mdadm: /dev/sdh1 requires wrong number of drives.
mdadm: no recogniseable superblock on /dev/sdh
mdadm: /dev/sdh has wrong uuid.
mdadm: /dev/sdg1 requires wrong number of drives.
mdadm: no recogniseable superblock on /dev/sdg
mdadm: /dev/sdg has wrong uuid.
mdadm: /dev/sdf1 requires wrong number of drives.
mdadm: no recogniseable superblock on /dev/sdf
mdadm: /dev/sdf has wrong uuid.
mdadm: /dev/sde1 requires wrong number of drives.
mdadm: no recogniseable superblock on /dev/sde
mdadm: /dev/sde has wrong uuid.
mdadm: /dev/sdd1 requires wrong number of drives.
mdadm: no recogniseable superblock on /dev/sdd
mdadm: /dev/sdd has wrong uuid.
mdadm: /dev/sdc1 requires wrong number of drives.
mdadm: no recogniseable superblock on /dev/sdc
mdadm: /dev/sdc has wrong uuid.
mdadm: no devices found for /dev/md2

I know this is a mess but I am really hoping that someone can tell me how
of point me to some docs, that will help me recover the raid.

Thanks in advance.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Mdadm -- Restoring an array
    ... past, when I've tried to restore a RAID, I've had trouble with it. ... The man page for mdadm makes it look like a RAID can be reassembled ... to tell mdadm to scan local drives and re-assemble an existing RAID. ... Of course, if a drive is replaced, you'll need to create a new conf file. ...
    (Debian-User)
  • Convert a single drive system to RAID
    ... I'm trying to convert a running installation of a Ubuntu server 7.10 AMD64 running on a single drive to a RAID 1 system, but I'm stuck at the boot with a BusyBox shell. ... The machine has two identical SATA drives, the system is at the moment ... Command mdadm is present ...
    (comp.os.linux)
  • Re: Mdadm -- Restoring an array
    ... It turns out that I must have formatted three of the drives, ... past, when I've tried to restore a RAID, I've had trouble with it. ... The man page for mdadm makes it look like a RAID can be reassembled ...
    (Debian-User)
  • RAID questions/advise
    ... I've had a couple of RAID boxes ticking away in the corner for years now ... How large of an array can mdadm handle? ... naming drives when there's more than 26 drives on the system? ... - 32TB) filesystems? ...
    (Ubuntu)
  • RAID questions/advise
    ... And I consider myself to be anything but an expert in the field, especially where mdadm is concerned. ... If I use my hardware RAID cards in JBOD mode, how does the kernel handle naming drives when there's more than 26 drives on the system? ... From what I hear, ext3 can handle filesystems up to 32TB in size, but has anyone actually done this? ...
    (Debian-User)