Heute morgen wurde ich mal wieder von einer “leeren” Drobo überrascht. Alle Daten in einem kaputten ext3 und keiner der Backup-Blöcke funktional. Gparted fand zwar die Partition, aber fsck.ext3 verweigerte die Arbeit. Nun macht testdisk seine Scans wieder.
[Update 2009/04/01] So wie es akutell aussieht ist das journal vom ext3 zerstört. Der fsck wurde mit einem komplett leeren Dateisystem beendet. Ich hatte zuvor ein Image der “Platte” gezogen. Als nächstes werde ich eine der Platten aus der Drobo ausbauen und direkt in der Linuxkiste scannen.
[Update 2009/04/22] Ich habe nun eine der Festplatten aus der Drobo direkt in meine Linuxkiste gesteckt. photorec hat viele Dateien gefunden, aber der Inhalt ist ein ziemlicher Remix und damit unbrauchbar. Ich werde jetzt mal testdisk drauflos lassen.This morning I was surprised again with an “empty” Drobo. All data in a broken ext3, with none of the backup blocks working. Gparted did find the partion, but fsck.ext3 refused to work. testdrive is now doing its scans.
[Update 2009/04/01] As it currently looks like, the complete ext3 journal has been broken. Running fsck did result in a complete empty filesystem. I did a image copy before the fsck. Next step is getting one of the disks out of the Drobo and scan it directly in the linux box.
[Update 2009/04/22] I moved on of the disks out of the drobo into a linux box directly. photorec discovered a lot of the files, but the content got a remix and is mostly useless. I will now try to use testdisk on it.
We would like to help you resolve this problem. Please contact technical support at http://www.drobo.com/support/request_support.php or call us at 1-866-426-4280, Mon-Fri from 6am-6pm PST, excluding Holidays.
May I suggest that you get your data to another device (if it is still readable) and re-format the drobo with parted (or gparted if that’s easier for you) as ext3. The drobo utils ironically don’t format in ext3, but in ext2 journalized which isn’t quite the same thing. The drobo does not currenlty support any other ext variant other that ext3 so if you use ext2 or ext4, you’ll get the same result as using btrfs,winfs or zfs or any other unsupported filesystem – corruption with the slightest error or unclean shutdown.
I learnt this the hard way and ended up hosing >800GB and wasting a week of my time.
Oh, and don’t use a logical unit size greater than 2TB for now if using ext3… maybe it will be more stable above this when ext support comes out of beta but for now LUN size = 2TB should be your max.
diJenerate
I used a 2T lun size and droboutils used gparted to partion the ‘drive’. I checked that the droboutils use mke2fs -j to generate the ext3. This exactly the same binary, which you use, when issueing a mkfs.ext3. I do not understand the difference you pointed out. Do you have any link for me?
Last time this fail happened, I was able to solve the issues with testdisk and photorec. This time, I did not find anything with both of them.
-mat-