Since upgrading to 11.04 I have been trying to get my 5 disk RAID5 array back online. The array was initially split in two, I tried to use a create command with the assume clean option to get it back into a single array. I think this did more harm than good because the mdadm default is now to use the 1.2 rather than 0.90 metadata format which I believe caused the metadata to be written over some of my data. This brought into doubt the disk ordering I thought the array should have as this order will not result in a mountable drive so I used a script to test every possible ordering of the five disks and none of them mounted, I then tried the same process only instead of mounting I ran an xfs_check and then a targetted xfs_repair (with the -n option to prevent any actual edits).
All this got me down to a reasonably small collection of disk layouts but I obviously only get one change to try the xfs_repair and the data is far to large to try an backup so I thought having the array run a parity check would be a good idea, I started out with the two array disk orderings I thought most likely to be correct ran check and as it turns out they both had exactly 8 for a mismatch_count and those 8 were discovered almost instantly. How is this possible? The two disk orderings are very different (acbde vs adcbe)...is it possible disk order will have no effect on a parity check? Just on the actual underlying data? If so it might be reasonable to try to run a repair on the array from one of these layouts and then recheck the file-system to see if it can now mount...but I am hesitant to do so as it would be the first step I have taken that intentionally writes more than metadata to the disks.
