[LUAU] after e2fsck, system reverts to 2005

[Julian Yap]

--- David Imai <dimai at email.com> wrote:
> I  was working on a file server that I obtained from HOSEF
> about 2 years ago. It runs Fedora Core 2.6.7, and has two hard
> drives in a RAID system (I think RAID-0).

You can check to see if it's running RAID-0:
$ cat /proc/mdstat

> Using a live CD I
> ran the command e2fsck -ckv /dev/md0. It seemed to work, but
> there was a message that said something like "date of
> superblock is in future." Later I noticed that some recent
> files were missing. Actually it looks like the system was
> restored to the state it was in in December 2005. The
> configuration files like /etc/samba/smb.conf and /etc/passwd
> are there, but they are in their 2005 versions. They don't
> reflect recent changes. Log files in /var/log look like they
> did in 2005. Files created in 2006 are missing. I don't think
> the system date and time were changed. Does anyone have any
> ideas on what happened? Can the missing files be recovered?

Strange things happen with RAID-0 and is generally advised
against.  I'm guessing that you are running RAID-0 and that the
striping of data failed or got corrupted at some point.  As a
result, the file system started writing data to other chunks on
the RAID-0 array.

When you did a file system check, it tried to ammend things but
ended up "fixing" the corrupt RAID-0 array but losing your data.

To possibly retrieve the data, you could direct dump the data of
each disk while mounted on a 2nd machine.  It won't be pretty.

At a former work place, we used a machine set up with software
RAID-0 as a build machine.  This worked extremely really well
for a long time...  Until the filesystem started doing strange
things and we abandoned it.

~ Julian