WLStack recently received a thank-you letter from a university research team after our technical support engineers helped restore access to a critical shared storage system. The customer’s Dell PowerVault ME5084 storage encountered an unexpected power loss during disk failure rebuild. After the incident, the XFS file system used by its NFS service reported metadata corruption and became inaccessible.
The affected storage contained years of research assets, including experimental data, analysis results, software development outputs and materials for multiple research projects. Much of this data was continuous, unique and difficult to reproduce. Losing access would have created substantial time, financial and research impact.
After receiving the request, WLStack’s support engineer responded immediately. We first used /etc/fstab to confirm the expected mount point and file system relationship. We then checked the block device, Multipath, LVM and device-mapper layers step by step, including fdisk, multipath -ll, lvscan, lvdisplay, vgscan, vgdisplay, dmsetup info and dmsetup deps, to verify the storage path, volume group, logical volume and device dependencies.
System logs showed XFS metadata CRC errors during mount attempts and instructed the administrator to unmount the file system and run repair. To reduce risk, we first confirmed that the target file system was not mounted and that application access had stopped. We then ran xfs_repair -n in no-modify mode to analyze the repair scope without writing changes. After the dry-run checks matched expectations, we proceeded with the repair and remounted the file system.
The recovery followed a cautious sequence: verify the storage paths first, confirm the logical volume next, and only then repair the file system. This avoided writing repairs while the underlying device state was unclear or while the file system might still be mounted. The affected XFS file system was restored, the NFS share returned to service and the research team regained access to its data.
In the thank-you letter, the customer noted that Engineer Chen analyzed the issue layer by layer, from storage and Multipath through LVM and XFS, with clear judgment, careful operations and reliable execution. For the research team, this was more than a technical fix; it protected the continuity of their research at a critical moment.
WLStack understands that research data is different from ordinary business data. Many results come from months or years of experiments and may not be reproducible. We will continue to support customers with solid engineering capability, rapid response and a responsible service mindset across compute, storage, network and AI infrastructure.