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I had some issues mounting my RAID array in that an error was thrown saying that an ext3 filesystem could not be found on /dev/md0.

So, maybe stupidly, i ran mkfs -t ext3 /dev/md0 - has this destroyed the data on the disks? I can't seem to find it anywhere that's for sure....but wondered if i dissassembled the array i might be able to retrieve the data from one of the disks (RAID 1 by the way)

spooky
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Yes, its gone. You could forensically recover some of the data on this disk, but it will be gappy. Time to dig out the back ups and do a restore.

Sirch
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  • Thanks Sirch, any idea what the problem could have been? How could the array be created ok (and it was active according to mdadm) but not have a filesystem? – spooky Jul 11 '12 at 11:06
  • @pavsid thats rather difficult to say unless you can provide some more information, what errors were you seeing? Anything in log files? Maybe it was set up to not mount more than X times because it wanted an fsck? Maybe there was something wrong with the first superblock that could have been recovered by mounting with another superblock. Was it even an ext3 filesystem? – Sirch Jul 11 '12 at 11:40
  • yeh it was definitely ext3 - i've had it working before, for about 3 years! I suspect it is the superblock - how would you go about 'mounting with another superblock'? – spooky Jul 11 '12 at 12:21
  • `mount -t ext3 -o sb= /dev/md0 /dir` – Sirch Jul 11 '12 at 12:29
  • Where n is the nth superblock you want to mount using. – Sirch Jul 11 '12 at 12:30
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You need to be prepared for the worst but you could try Testdisk and/or Photorec.

Chopper3
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