At Sun, 26 Jun 2011 09:58:16 +0200 CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org> wrote: > > > > On Sat, Jun 25, 2011 at 3:16 PM, Robert Heller <heller at deepsoft.com> wrote: > > > > > If 'fdisk -l /dev/sda' does not show anything, either the disks were > > never partitioned or formatted, at least not as a bare drive. What kind > > of disk is this (I know it says USB above, but I am assuming these are > > bare disk(s) that you installed in a USB enclosure). > > > > It is *possible* these disks were part of a *hardware* RAID array, in > > which case only the hardware RAID would know how to deal with them > > (they would have some vendor-specific metadata / superblock on them > > somewhere). If the disks are not partitularly large (< 1TB) if they > > were actually in use they would likely have a MS-DOS partition table > > (which fdisk -l would be displaying). If they are larger disks they > > might have gpt partition table (parted would show this). It is > > possible that they have a Solaris disk label (if they were in a Solaris > > machine). > > > > It is *possible* that someone used them as part of a Linux software > > RAID array using the whole disk, in which case there might be a MD > > superblock on them (mdadm might see it) and it is ALSO possible that > > they were part of a LVM volume group, also using the whole disk as a > > PV, in which case there should be LVM metadata on them (lvm might see > > this). > > > > If none of the above, they are just 'factory fresh', never used disks. > > > > -- > > > > > > All the drives are old 160GB SATA. There's 1x 160GB IDE as well. > > They were used in the office on various machines, so no hardware RAID, but > they definitely had some data on them. > I did get some drives with software RAID on and could recover the data, but > there's 2 drives which I can't figure out what filesystem they have / had on > them. > We use Linux & FreeBSD, so I suspect they had ZFS / UFS on them, but > couldn't mount them on a FreeBSD server with ZFS or UFS either. Wondering: could these extra 2 drives have been 'spare' disks that were never actually installed? And got mixed in with the 'used' drives? It is also possible that the drives got 'wiped' somehow, eg they were on the bottom shelf when the cleaning crew came by with the floor waxing machine... > > -- Robert Heller -- 978-544-6933 / heller at deepsoft.com Deepwoods Software -- http://www.deepsoft.com/ () ascii ribbon campaign -- against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org -- against proprietary attachments