Mark 5 module recovery

Background

Starting from a certain Conduant SDK version (uncertain which), the Conduant card firmware has lost its ability to gracefully play back modules that contain one or more corrupt/dead disks. Such modules will either freeze the Mark 5, or will play back extremely slowly with zero data.

Workaround

Disks have to be removed from the module and attached to a server so that the raw disk data can be accessed. One option is to place disks into a Mark6 module and load that into a Mark6. Alternatively, disks can be inserted into server disk cradles.

The disks of the module should appear as blank drives without partitions:

dhcp30222:~ # cat /proc/partitions
major minor  #blocks  name

   2        0          4 fd0
   8        0  160836480 sda
   8        1   41943040 sda1
   8        2  114861056 sda2
   8        3    4031343 sda3
  11        0    1048575 sr0
   8       16 1953514584 sdb
   8       32 1953514584 sdc
   8       48 1953514584 sdd
   8       64 1953514584 sde
   8       80 1953514584 sdf
   8       96 1953514584 sdg

In the above example, six disks (/dev/sdb to /dev/sdg) are still intact.