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I've been running Ubuntu 12.04 LTS for about 6 months on a computer that has 3 180gb SSDs in EXT4 RAID5 configured through the motherboard's BIOS. The OS froze and computer had to be forced down. On boot after the BIOS it just hangs at a blank screen. I booted off a live CD and was unable to mount /dev/dm-0, the RAID, because of a "superblock could not be read" error.

My RAID is made up of drives /dev/sda, /dev/sdb/, and /dev/sdc. Running "fdisk -l" showed a "missing partition table" error on /dev/sdb. I also ran testdisk and it returned unrecoverable partition errors. I wasn't able to run anything on that drive individually because it was considered in use. I booted with just that drive plugged in and tried messing with it, but got superblock errors.

I tried recovering the superblock from each of the backups listed to no effect. I zeroed the entire /dev/sdb drive and when I booted it went to rebuild mode for that drive, but I'm still hanging on boot of the OS and unable to mount the RAID or see any of the data.

I imagine I've only made things worse by zeroing one of the drives, so before I get to a state where my data becomes unrecoverable, what can I do to either fix this superblock error or recover my data?

jchysk
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    Tempted to close (home setup, belongs to superuser). Anyhow - that is a good reason to go out and get a CHEAP and SMALL SSD (32gb or something) just as boot device. Bypasses all the issues a RAID may have. I avoid booting from a RAID that is not a mirror for pretty much that reason. – TomTom Jun 14 '13 at 07:56
  • That's a good idea. It's probably better to get two small drives and run them RAID 1 for boot? I don't want to get into issues like this again where I'm left unoperational for an extended period of time. – jchysk Jun 14 '13 at 17:08

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You should clone your disks with dd and then try to recover data from the clones. Never ever try to fix original disks.

Tony Stark
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  • If I had dded the drives and were trying to recover the data or if I were a gambling man this doesn't help towards a solution. – jchysk Aug 03 '13 at 02:36