Anyone help with fixing bad superblock?

Well my raid 5 lvm dumped as I mentioned a few days ago. I have been trying to recover ever since. The Overclockix disk brought my array backup and detected the lvm but now it wont mount because of a bad superblock.

Of course parted doesnt recognize there to be a partition on the disk (its a black outline). Anyways I have been running

For a day and a bit and so far its just a whole bunch of ............................ scrolling across the screen. I understand this to mean that it is searching for a secondary superblock.

Has anyone successfully manually repaired a borked filesystem? I have been doing a pile of reading (mostly on the osdir and oss mail lists with some suggestions but nothing much that has helped in any practical sense.

Oddly enough my second raid 5 which previously had mounted fine is also complaining about superblocks even though there is no indication that the raid had problems.

Anyone help? I would hate to have dumped 6 TB of data all at once (especially since raid 5 is supposed to prevent this)

I actually have. We had an external drive attached to a DishNetwork receiver that destroyed the file system. Luckily, it was just the superblock that was bad, so I restored it from a backup one. This link is for ext2/3, so it may be different. But, it should give you a direction to go.

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/recover-bad-superblock-from-corrupted-partition/

thanks for that link!

I have read tones and tones and not come across that yet. I will give it a shot when i get home *crosses fingers*

After a full week of working and reworking the drives I have failed to restore either raid 5 array.

I suspect that it is partly due to XFS as there are not (strangely) as many tools for it as ext* drives

I am formatting the drives to ext3 as we speak. Time to move on... that'll teach me to not have enough hard drives for a backup!

Any reason you are not using EXT4?

They are designated storage drives so really I am just shooting for maximum recoverability. The tools for ext3 are more mature.

Thats the only reason.

i've been following this thread since you originally posted it as i was hoping you would be able to find a solution but i'm sorry to hear that you weren't able to recover the data. i am still not totally sure of the real benefits of running lvm on top of md raid. to me, it just seemed like it added an extra layer that could give me problems but then again, i have never use lvm so i might just not know of the benefits.

well from my reading, it was supposed to make expanding the volumes easier. In the end I tend to agree it seems to have just added complexity to the situation