Greg Oster <oster@cs.usask.ca> writes:

Greg,

> > However, life as we know it was no longer to be found on the raid1
> > planet. This was once obviously a seriously damaged animal. And now it
> > is dead:

> Yuck.  I suspect doing 'fsck -f /dev/rraid1e' would yield a whole bunch of 
> lossage....

You bet.

> > PS. During my permutations of disks and IDE controllers when trying to
> > isolate the hardware problem the other raid components were likely at
> > some time located on the bad Promise controller. I wasn't mindful of
> > that since I didn't know that the controller was bad and because of
> > autoconfig it didn't matter that disks were renumbered. And my guess
> > is that no disk was safe when attached to that controller.
> 
> Ya...  all they need to do is scribble stuff over the 'good' disks, and it 
> doesn't matter how much RAID you have... :(  Once 2 disks in the RAID 5 set 
> got scribbled on (even randomly), it's game over :(

Right. I'm aware of that. However, I didn't really count on one
failure (the controller) striking all my disks, thereby erasing the
redundancy the RAID provided. 

In one sense I actually made things worse by depending on autoconfig,
since without that I would in all likelihood not have dared move disks
around, and then only the initial component would have been damaged
(which I would have been able to recover from).

Well, well. Lessons learned the hard way stick with you longer... Time
to start reconstructing the contents.

Thanks for your help,

Johan