[TriLUG] re-installing linux without losing data on RAID device

[prhodes at vdsinc.com]

Hello all, I have a question that I'm hoping someone can help me with.  A
few days ago, a lighting strike
hosed our CVS server.  A quick swap of the power supply brought the machine
back up physically, but
apparently the sudden power loss corrupted something, as Linux will not
boot into runlevel 3 without
half the processes that start aborting with seg faults.   I can boot into
single user mode though, and I have
backups of the CVS tree, which is a Good Thing...

What I'm wondering though is this...  is there any way for me to re-install
Linux, but keep the
data intact, so I don't have to muck around with restoring from a backup?
The data was on a RAID
device, md0, configured for RAID level 1, and using physical partitions
hde1 and hdg1.  The two
drives hde and hdg are physicall separate from the drive where the OS
itself lives, so I know they
won't need to be repartitioned or anything...   but I'm not sure how to, or
even if it's possible to, re-establish
the RAID configuration under the fresh Linux install, without wiping out
that data.

If it matters, I'm running SuSE Linux 7.2, and the md0 device was formatted
with ReiserFS.

Thanks,


Phillip Rhodes
Application Designer
Voice Data Solutions
919-571-4300 x225
prhodes at vdsinc.com

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