[ale] Hardware RAID5 recovery in software

[Lightner, Jeff]

A lot of the old hardware RAID controllers by various manufacturers were actually OEM from LSI.    (e.g. most of the Dell PERC and SAS controllers since PERC 2 – the early PERC 2 actually had both an Adaptec and an LSI model).

If you can determine the vendor/model from the failed computer’s RAID whether embedded into the motherboard or a separate slot you might be able to find an equivalent OEM.   Sometimes newer versions in the same family will see the RAID setup of older drives.

I haven’t used Pivar in forever because luckily I haven’t needed to but they were able to get some really old data for me once off of tape.   You might give them a call to see if they can do anything for you if all else fails:
http://www.pivar.com


From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Benjie
Sent: Thursday, March 06, 2014 12:18 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] Hardware RAID5 recovery in software

Is this a SATA or a SCSI HBA?  Is the HBA a card, or is it built into the motherboard?  Is it a software raid using the mainboard's SATA interfaces?  Can you answer those questions?

On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 11:18 AM, Dustin Strickland <dustin.h.strickland at gmail.com<mailto:dustin.h.strickland at gmail.com>> wrote:
I just want to put this out there: I'm not *very* familiar with RAID,
but I get by. I have a unique situation and I'm not sure how to handle
it -- suggestions would be appreciated.

So, my client has a machine - an *old* machine - that was running an
ancient version of Redhat, acting as a Samba server. I'm not too clear
on the details of what happened, but the result: the motherboard in the
server is apparently bad. So is the RAID card that was installed. Also
one of the disks of the three that were installed. The other two work
fine. This machine will not boot, I tried everything. We've made the
decision to set up another machine to run Samba. Now here's the hitch.
The only available machine has only two SATA ports and we still need to
grab his old data.

Yesterday I used a Live USB stick to dd the data from both of the good
drives, one at a time, on to a third. Now, I don't even know if the
data is recoverable - after we started copying the second disk, we left
it to run overnight so I haven't been able to check it out. If it *is*,
how would I go about it? I've never encountered hardware RAID before,
either - would this even be possible to fix in software?




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