Crash of both HDD in RAID1 - please Help!?!

    Hi,


    as I wrote in the title, both of my hdd in my server crashed yesterday at the same time.


    The first hdd is completly crashed. The second hdd just loose some parts and I can connect via SSH/SFTP... but... the system-partition (sda1) is okay, the swap-partition (sda2) is okay... the partition thats most important for me is sda3, the data-partition. This has crashed and loosed the some of the filesystem-informations. Even if I try to mount it, (mout /dev/sda3/...) I get an error with the info, that I have to tell the right filesystemformat. And this is my problem. fdisk shows me, that this will be "Linux Raid autodetect".


    I tried so many things, but nothing works.


    Did someone knows a working tool to change the filesystem without loosing the data in it? It should be for Linux, or Windows via SFTP.


    The Serversystem is Debian 7.


    If someone has an idea but need more informations, please tell me.

    Do you have physical access to the machine? If not, I'd first replace sdb and low-level-copy sda's content using ddrescue to sdb into an image file. This file can be mounted and you can run fsck on it. Maybe this will bring back most of the data.


    Question: what type of hdd crashed? Last year, within three weeks, three HDDs crashed in my server. All of them were Seagate 3TB SATA.


    In general: raid1 doesn't replace a working backup!

    ...a working backup... for this I´d planned and used sdc - the third hdd in this server... but I´ve had a problem with the "working"... :cursing:


    I don´t have physical access, ´cause the server is installed at hetzner many km away from me... so I have to try it with the ddrescue... think I find a manual at google...


    Thank you very much first.

    Hello TobiasTM,


    write to the support and write that they replace the crashed HDD. It is recommended that you tell the support the serial number. So, they replace the correct one :) . Also tell the support that they can replace the HDD immediately, then they will not ask when they do the replacement.
    Usually the support at Hetzner is very quick. When they have replaced the HDD, you can boot in Rescue an try to fix your sda3


    Greets
    Chris

    Hetzner's support is pretty good as they usually answer within a few minutes. Just wrote them a mail yesterday at 0am and got an answer just 3 minutes later.
    Ddrescue is a so to say error-tolerant-dd and works pretty well. But depending on "how crashed" your hdd is, data-rescue can take a while. Good luck!

    Thank you all for you answers.


    The contact to hetzner was successfull and they replaced the hdd2s faster than I can look in the same night. But... then I tried to recover all the data from sdc3 to the both knew, but there where no data on sdc3. That was my problem. So I wrote them again and their built in the old sda.


    I will try the ddrescue and show then.


    Again: Thank you very much for your help