Cannot mount RAID-1 hard drive

[CHONG Yu Meng]

> From: "Lonni J Friedman" <netllama at gmail.com>
> 
> With Linux mdraid, there are two components. You have the ondisk
> format for the array, and then you have the state of the array (in
> /proc/mdstat ). What seems wrong/broken in your setup is that the
> partition type should be id=fd (Linux raid), and not type=83.
> However, the fact that the array was seemingly started (and visible in
> /proc/mdstat ) suggests that the array is fine, but the discrepancy
> between the partition type & filesystem information is causing
> confusion. You might try changing the partition type to fd, and see
> if you can then mount it.
> 
> Also you never said, which Linux distribution was managing this RAID
> array prior to the disk failure? Its possible, although unlikely that
> something in that SUSE Live CD is either broken or incompatible with
> whatever is on disk.


Thanks, Lonni!

How would I go about changing the partition type and would I run the 
risk of losing data if I did so? I'm not familiar with this, so 
command-line examples would be much appreciated! :)

So, I change the partition type to fd then start the array, then
mount the array? i.e. mount /dev/md127?

The hard disks come from a DLink DNS-323, so my guess is the 
distribution they are running is probably Debian. The Live CD
I am using to mount the hard disk is OpenSUSE 12.2 (Gnome). I
don't know if there are issues with parted in OpenSUSE though.

The trouble is, I cannot bring the hard disks out of the customer
site, so I have to do the data extraction there. I could try
with a Fedora Live CD and see if the results are different, though.

Thanks for your reply!

Regards,
Pascal Chong