[nmglug] Did I totally hose my computer?

[J. Marsden DeLapp]

Brendan wrote:
> Oh, I hate that for you.  How big in boog.img.gz?

It looks like it was 19 MB

> 
>> So it appears I hosed the MBR and partition table on dev/sda.
> 
> And possibly some data at the beginning of one of your partitions. 
> Depends on how big boot.img.gz is.
> 
>> The computer was setup with three 640 GB drives in a RAID 5
>> configuration. So maybe if I can get it to boot again the stuff on sdb
>> and sdc could be used to rebuild the RAID array?
> 
> There's basically 4 things you have to do:
> 
> 1. Reinstall your bootloader.  No problem.
> 
> 2. Recreate your partitions as they used to be.  Probably not a problem 
> becaose of....
> 
> 3. Your RAID5 array needs to resync.
> 
> 4. Reinstall your /boot, assuming you have one.

After reviewing the steps needed to attempt to restore, and attempting 
to reinstall the boot loader, and attempting to figure out and recreate 
the partitions, I decided the best thing is to just reinstall everything.

But that would be too easy.

So I guessed the partition setup for sda and proceeded to try to fix things.

I was able to install a very basic system on sda2 and from there I am 
able to see the raid array and mess with grub.

And eight hours later the computer still will not boot with the root on 
RAID/LVM and the RAID array will not resync.

I can see all the data is still on the RAID array using sdb1 and sdc1. 
sda1 shows up as "removed", and I can't seem to figure out how to 
unremove it.

I should have gone with the reinstalling everything method.

-- 
=============================================================
J. Marsden DeLapp, PE
President
DeLapp & Associates, Inc. dba DeLapp Engineering.
Providing lighting and power planning, design and analysis services
for commercial, industrial and large residential facilities.
1190 Harrison Road Ste 3a
Santa Fe NM 87507
(505) 983-5557
http://DeLapp.com
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