On 2017-05-01 16:59, Anthony Youngman wrote:
Get hold of lsdrv, and see what that tells you. (Look at the raid wiki for details.) I don't know if it will have endian issues, but if it doesn't an expert will probably be able to chime straight in and tell you the create command.
Ah! And that took me straight to the "asking for help" page.
The raw data is here: https://gist.github.com/anonymous/321b6db3160c259c4a4dd549817a3d07
To summarize: * smartctl either fails to run or shows nothing wrong (depending on the vintage of drive, maybe?); * mdadm --examine fails to read the superblock because of the endianness issue (see https://raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/RAID_superblock_formats#The_version-0...) * lsdrv fails to report any useful MD topology information I could see (other than confirming that each md device had four members, one partition on each drive)
I also see 3 "FD" type partitions on each disk, but lsdrv only identifies *2* of them as belonging to an MD array. Not sure what's up with that.
The other thing is, read up on overlays because, if you overlay those disks, you will be able to "create" without actually writing to the disks. That way you can test - and even do a complete backup and recovery - without ever actually writing to, and altering, the original disks.
Currently reading, thanks. Didn't know overlays could be used for block devices.
Spinning up a QEMU instance of Linux-PPC or Linux-MIPS with the disks in pass-through mode has also been mentioned, but... ugh. Anecdotal reports from the web suggest that doing so would just be opening up a second rabbit hole in addition to the one I'm already headed down.
-Adam