Help, my disk array has one dead member

[Karl Auer]

On Wed, 2017-03-22 at 19:41 -0700, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
> Unfortunately, I have no place to direct a copy of the entire RAID,
> so ddrescue is not an option.  I did get the three drives that I'm
> going to put in the other system

Then you DO have somewhere to put the data :-)

You could set up your new system and send the dd over the network to
it. Easy peasy.

Or you could get a USB enclosure, stick one of the new drives in it,
boot the dud system to LiveCD and do the dd to the USB-connected drive.
You can set your new system up with only two drives in the RAID to
start with and add the third when you have extracted the files you want
off it.

There are other variations on those themes.

If you are REALLY stuck, you could take a USB stick and use ddrescue in chunks - grab the first N blocks onto the USB stick, copy them to your new system, go back and get the next N blocks, copy to your new system, then get the next N blocks and so on until it's all been copied. Could take a while if the RAID is big and the USB stick is small. Definitely suggest writing down your start and end blocks, it wouldn't do to lose track :-)

Regards, K.


-- 
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Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
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