[ale] Disaster Recovery - HELP!

[Jonathan Glass]

Anyone ever tried to recover data from a hardware RAID 5 partition after losing
2 out of 5 disks?  The directory structure appears, but I get INPUT/OUTPUT
errors when trying to LS directories.  Any thoughts on how to recover, except
from tape?  

The two drives failed simultaneously, and the RAID card took the whole virtual
drive offline.  I rebooted the machine on Monday AM and forced the two drives
back online.  Unfortunately, the box started an fsck on reboot, and destroyed
the ext3 log (saw something about it in the text that flashed by, but didn't
write it down).  Now every time it runs fsck (on reboots) it deletes more data.
 "df -h" still shows correct numbers, and "ls -l /mnt_point" shows the directory
structure, but I can only ls certain subdirectories.  When I do an ls, I receive
kernel errors 

EXT2-fs error (device sd(8,33)): ext2_check_page: bad entry in directory #xxx:
rec_len is smaller than minimal - offset=yyy, inode=0, rec_len=0, name_len=0.

I have no tape backups, so I've only got one shot.  I tried doing a dd of the
partition, but it simply duplicates the errors.

Any idea who can, or how to, recover the lost data?  I'd hate to lost 4+ years
of research data.

Thanks

-- 
Jonathan Glass
Systems Support Specialist II 
Institute for Bioengineering & Biosciences
404.385.0127

-------------------------------------------------
This mail sent through IMP: http://horde.org/imp/
_______________________________________________
Ale mailing list
Ale at ale.org
http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale