Solved Restore RAID-1 after changing a disc

J

juleswest

Hello,

We have an emergency on a FreeBSD server.


Here is the situation :


We have a dedicated server (FreeBSD) with RAID-1 on wich one of the disc has crashed. The crashed disc has been replaced by a new one but we can’t boot on the FreeBSD system anymore. We can only boot in rescue mode on a minimal linux system.

We expect that the boot loader was on the crashed disc and not replicated on the healthy one that is still installed.

We dont know what to do and we can’t find relevant information on how to restore the RAID-1 and the boot loader to get the FreeBSD system up and running again.

As we don’t want to loose data and would like to restore the system as it was we are not confident in trying things we don't control well.


Our questions are :

Do we have to recreate the RAID under linux in rescue mode ? Will we be able to load the FreeBSD system after that ?

Is there a way to re-install the boot loader so we can choose to boot on the old disc were FreeBSD is installed ?



Thanks in advance for your help.
 
Hardware RAID1 or gmirror(8) setup or zfs(1) setup?

Most likely, all you'll need to do is boot off a FreeBSD LiveCD or an mfsBSD CD/USB stick, and install the boot loader onto the "old" drive. That should allow you to boot into FreeBSD with a degraded RAID1 array, add the other drive to it to start the rebuild, and install the boot loader onto that drive. How you install the boot loader will depend on the answer to the first question above. :)
 
Hello,

Thanks for your answer... the problem was finally solved as soon as we figured out that our provider has replaced the wrong disk... with a crashed disk and the new disk in the the server it makes it difficult to boot ;-)

Anyway, the solution you gave would be the right one, in case we had been in a situation were the boot loader wasn't in the left disk... the difficult part of it is that without a physical access to the server it's not easy to plug a USB stick or a bootable CD.
 
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