[mdlug] More new hard drive details

[Aaron Kulkis]

Jeff Hanson wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 14, 2009 at 8:40 AM, Jonathan Billings <billings at negate.org> wrote:
>> If the / filesystem is lost, regardless of whether it's in LVM or not,
>> you can still find and mount other LVM volumes.  The only non-lvm
>> partition I ever use anymore is /boot because of GRUB.
> 
> I can attest to their resiliency with data corruption.  I am using a
> MD-RAID + LVM2 + LUKS/dm-crypt configuration.  I had a bad experience
> over the last few months due to faulty Crucial Ballistx 1066MHz DDR2
> memory.  After several dozen hangs, crashes, etc., several of my file
> systems were corrupted.  After replacing the memory with Kingston EEC

That's all well and nice, but it doesn't tell us much.  The crucial
piece of the pie is the LVM configuration -- even if NONE of your
non-root partitions gets corrupted, if the LVM config is corrupted,
then the rest of the partitions are.... recoverably ONLY with the
investment of significant time and $$$.

As for the filesystems themselves, they don't care whether they
are on an LVM or not... the filesystem is just a string of bytes,
whether on one contigous partition, or in blocks added willy-nilly
from several block devices.


> modules I was able to boot an Ubuntu LiveCD and mount the RAID array,
> LVM, and dm-crypt volumes and run fsck on the ext3 filesystem.  There
> were errors all over the place but I was able to get my non-critical
> but annoying to replace configuration files out of /etc and elsewhere.