This turned up in my inbox; names have been removed to protect the innocent
What is the best way to recover data from a set of mirrored disks if you’re not sure how they were actually mirrored? One of our machines here started having hard disk problems after the power cut last friday, and eventually it titally dies and had to be relaced. The machine has a set of SCSI external disks daisy-chained off it, which were mirrored. Thing is, all the mirroring info was on the hard disk that is now my paperweight, so I’m not sure what bits were on what disks/slices.
Hasn’t anyone heard of redundant copies of the metadata database… stored on at least one disk of every controller? In my case I also have my metadata configuration printed up and stuck to the side wall of the cubicle, as well as backed up on my network accessible home directory. Paranoid? well, lets just say It keeps what remains of my hair in place.