[TriLUG] directory listing from a damaged RAID?

[Charles Mangin]

a couple of months ago, i had a drive in my 3-disk RAID5 go flaky  
after a power failure. not a big deal, though, since it was a RAID5,  
plus i have a backup in my fire safe. i was able to repair the damage  
and move on, knowing that i needed to pull that drive at my earliest  
convenience.

i decided to do it after the Christmas break, purchasing 3 new drives  
for that purpose, and to go from 1.5Tb to 3Tb at the same time.

unfortunately, another drive in the array decided that being powered  
off for three days over Christmas was its signal to die. completely.  
compounding that, the flaky one came spins up now, but gives errors on  
every sector.  so, now i have one good drive, one that has gone from  
bad to worse, and one that was good, but died young.

again, lucky i have that backup.

problem is, there's probably some stuff that went to data heaven that  
wasn't backed up - i only do those backups every month or so, so  
there's probably a month or more of new stuff that's not on the fire  
safe backup.

also, luckily, the RAID (and its subsequent backup) is mainly an  
archive of things i create on my iMac, which is backed up separately.  
time machine, ftw.

so, finally to my questions:

is there any way to get a directory listing from the one, undamaged,  
drive from my old array? that way, i can see what's not on the fire  
safe backup, and grab it from the time machine backup, if it's there.

is it worth trying something like restarting the array with mdadm of  
three drives, one active and two missing?


Charles Mangin
Option8, LLC - Making Macs happy since 1999.
option8 at option8.com | http://www.option8consulting.com
mobile: 919.368.7167
skype: option8llc