0

So I had the /home partition in two disks in RAID1, one disk failed so the system booted with lots of errors about that. I didn't have another disk to replace the one that failed, so I wanted to remove the raid and keep only one disk. To do that I did:

  1. Stop the RAID:

    mdadm --stop /dev/md1

  2. Zeroing the blocks

    mdadm --zero-superblock /dev/md1

  3. Remove the config file /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf

  4. Update the fstab

After that, I can no longer mount the partition because it appears as it doesn't have a filesystem.

I don't know if I have destroyed the filesystem. Can I recover it?

fdisk -l returns:

Disk /dev/sda: 931.5 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x000f04de

Device     Boot Start        End    Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sda1        2048 1953523711 1953521664 931.5G da Non-FS data

Thanks

Msegade
  • 103
  • 2

2 Answers2

1

As we saw (I saw the problem in situ with Msegade), the problem was the resultant sda1 wasn't a partition with a filesystem within. When you disabled the RAID, sda had 1 partition that contained an image with its own (DOS) partition table:

root@server:~# fdisk /dev/sda

Welcome to fdisk (util-linux 2.25.2).
Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
Be careful before using the write command.


Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/sda: 931.5 GiB, 1000204886016 bytes, 1953525168 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x000f04de

Device     Boot Start        End    Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sda1        2048 1953523711 1953521664 931.5G da Non-FS data


Command (m for help):

So we can see:

root@server:~# fdisk /dev/sda1

Welcome to fdisk (util-linux 2.25.2).
Changes will remain in memory only, until you decide to write them.
Be careful before using the write command.


Command (m for help): p
Disk /dev/sda1: 931.5 GiB, 1000203091968 bytes, 1953521664 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: dos
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

Device      Boot Start        End    Sectors   Size Id Type
/dev/sda1p1 *     2048 1953521663 1953519616 931.5G 83 Linux


Command (m for help):

Sure we can optimize this process, but it is a similar procedure for using partitions into i.e. a virtual machine image. First, we see the first free loop device:

root@server:~# losetup -f
/dev/loop0

Then we attach our sda1 to loop0

root@server:~# losetup /dev/loop0 /dev/sda1

With kpartx we create the mapped devices:

root@server:~# kpartx -av /dev/loop0

If we run lsblk, we see the result:

root@server:~# lsblk 
NAME      MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda         8:0    0 931.5G  0 disk 
`-sda1      8:1    0 931.5G  0 part 
sdb         8:16   0 931.5G  0 disk 
|-sdb1      8:17   0   953M  0 part /
[...]
loop0       7:0    0 931.5G  0 loop 
`-loop0p1 253:0    0 931.5G  0 part

And the maped device file:

root@server:~# ls -lsa /dev/mapper/
total 0
0 drwxr-xr-x  2 root root      80 Jun 23 16:02 .
0 drwxr-xr-x 19 root root    3500 Jun 23 16:02 ..
0 crw-------  1 root root 10, 236 Jun 23 16:02 control
0 lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root       7 Jun 23 16:02 loop0p1 -> ../dm-0

So we now can mount the filesystem /dev/mapper/loop0p1 where we want.

Francisco Javier Tsao Santín
  • 26
  • 1
0

I think the whole thing is failing because you didn't remove the raid device md1 The exact steps are : 1. mdadm --stop raid_device 2. mdadm --remove raid_device 3. mdadm --zero-superblock component_device…

Rituraj
  • 116
  • 3