Emergency UNIX and Linux Support

Need help/advice urgently.

I really shot myself in the foot this time. Here is the scenario
Have a Solaris server Solaris 10 x86 Update 8.
Installed an LSI MegaRaid 9280 raid controller and attached a 16 bay JBOD box to it, created a RAID6 virtual drive with 1 hot spare.

Created a ZFS filesystem on it and loaded it up with users data about 7.6TB.
Created another identical system and rsynced the data from the first to the second.
Both of the servers are to act as fileservers exporting the directoies via NFS

Then I discovered the disk performance was horrible, did some research and discover my configuration was less the ideal. I decide to install Ubuntu 10.04LTS server on one of the machines and rebuild the RAID filesystem. This is where I shot myself in the foot.

I did zpool destroy on the ZFS system
Then installed Ubuntu
Ubuntu recognized the disk and an fdisk -l displayed the correct partitioning.

Code:

Disk /dev/sdb: 12995.5 GB, 12995497295872 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1579945 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x08046e04

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdb1               1      267350  2147483647+  ee  GPT

I then created an ext3 filesystem on it, loaded all of the data on it and things were fine for about a week.

I started get I/O errors any time I accessed the filesystem. I tried unmounting the file system and remounting but it would not remount

Code:

root@fileserver2:~/testdisk-6.13# mount /dev/sdb1 /raid2
mount: special device /dev/sdb1 does not exist

Tried rebooting still no luck

I ran parted then and it gives this error:

Code:

root@fileserver2:~/testdisk-6.13# parted /dev/sdb
GNU Parted 2.2
Using /dev/sdb
Welcome to GNU Parted! Type 'help' to view a list of commands.
(parted) print
Error: /dev/sdb: unrecognised disk label
(parted) quit

I then realized that when I created the filesystem I had not run parted to create a proper partition table. Big oops.

A few questions questions

1 Why would mkfs allow me to create a filesystem on disk that was not partitioned correctly?

Why did it take a week for things to go south?

and finally is this a reasoble way to recover from my screwup:

Run parted:

Code:

mklabel gpt
rescue 0 267350

Any hints, advice or other solutions would be greatly appreciated.

There's no reason you should need to use parted when you used fdisk instead. I/O errors are never supposed to happen. The problems may be unrelated.

That is also the problem, I only ran fdisk -l on the Ubuntu system. On the solaris system ZFS took car of everything as I used the whole disk:

Code:

zpool create raid1  c4t0d0