up vote 0 down vote favorite
share [g+] share [fb]

Tonight I came home to one of my servers stuck during boot saying the boot drive couldn't be found. I have three HDD's in this server and BIOS picked up all three, but reported one as having a capacity of 0.0GB so I think it's safe to say that that one bit the dust. One of the other drives is encrypted but seems to work perfectly fine. I booted into a Linux live CD and was able to mount its boot partition with no problems. However, when I try to open its encrypted partition I am given no such luck. The command cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/sdx2 [name] outputs nothing and exits. cryptsetup luksDump /dev/sdx2 does the same when it should be outputting info about the encrypted drive. Is it safe to say that this partition is toast and I should be cutting my loses since both drives in my RAID setup were ruined? Or is there anything that can be done to get this sucker unencrypted so I can at least copy some files out? Thank you!

And yes, the system is hooked up to a surge protector. Not like it did any good though.

link|improve this question
1  
What raid level? – Luke Jan 11 at 6:09
RAID 1. The two drives were in an encrypted RAID mirror. – shanet Jan 11 at 6:13
1  
What is output to dmesg when you run cryptsetup? Also: run cryptsetup with --verbose --debug; update your question with any dmesg or cryptsetup output. I'd also try these drives in a different system - maybe the SATA interfaces are fried, and the drives are OK. Same for trying while booted off a LiveCD, just to eliminate any OS corruption as a cause. – BeeDee Jan 11 at 6:37
Turns out I'm actually incredibly stupid and forgot that I encrypted the RAID array, not the individual partition. A quick mdadm --assemble --scan, and then cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/md0 [name] and I was able to get all my files. The first drive that BIOS reports as 0.0GB is still fried, but at least I can still get my data and invest in a better surge protector. Thanks for your suggestions guys. – shanet Jan 11 at 8:14
@shanet Make sure to post that as an answer then so others who come in here can figure it out – Luke Jan 11 at 16:19
feedback

1 Answer

up vote 0 down vote accepted

Turns out I'm actually incredibly stupid and forgot that I encrypted the RAID array, not the individual partition. A quick mdadm --assemble --scan, and then cryptsetup luksOpen /dev/md0 [name] and I was able to get all my files. The first drive that BIOS reports as 0.0GB is still fried, but at least I can still get my data and invest in a better surge protector. Thanks for your suggestions guys.

link|improve this answer
feedback

Your Answer

 
or
required, but never shown
discard

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.