[ale] Hardware RAID5 recovery in software

[Dustin Strickland]

Jesus, I've been short of time lately... I didn't realize that it's
been a whole week since I was able to check up on this. Anyway, I can't
try anything else as it's out of my hands now, but I tried everything I
could think of. Unfortunately, I couldn't recover anything.

As per Jim's suggestion, I tried swapping out the logic board in the
bad drive, which had no effect. Before and after, it would only read
153MB of data from the drive - I thought it to be a bad head, which I
confirmed by spinning up the drive with the top cover off(mostly for my
amusement; I wouldn't have done it if I wasn't totally sure the drive
was bad).

Raidextract failed to produce anything useful. When I ran it,
regardless of the settings I used it only produced errors about parity
mismatches. After looking into it a bit more, it seemed like the array
had been running in degraded mode for several months before anyone
noticed a problem, and that my client(a Windows IT admin) had tried to
fix it previously and neglected to inform me of what he had done. This
was the worst-case scenario.

On Thu, 6 Mar 2014 14:15:36 -0500
dev null zero two <dev.null.02 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Also http://www.freeraidrecovery.com/ works really well for being
> free. Windows only but you just connect your two good drives, point
> the software at them, it detects the RAID parameters and then lets
> you save a dd image of the resulting reconstructed array that you can
> then mount or access however you want.
> 
> 
> On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 2:09 PM, Jim Kinney <jim.kinney at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > If all 3 drives are the same make and model, dd the working 2 drives
> > first. Then try replacing the failed drives board with one from a
> > good drive.
> >
> > with 2 drives out of 3 in a raid5, you're still OK data-wise.
> > raidextract may be able to rebuild the data from the 2 drives.
> >
> > I used a tool a zillion years ago that I can't find right now that
> > did exactly this: from a dd image of all the available drives,
> > extract all the file possible to a new location.
> >
> >
> > On Thu, Mar 6, 2014 at 1:29 PM, Dustin Strickland <
> > dustin.h.strickland at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Sorry, let me give you guys a better idea of the hardware - this
> >> appears to be a custom build. Some Asrock motherboard as far as I
> >> can tell with a VIA chipset and an Athlon XP something... an
> >> unbranded SATA2 RAID card(which doesn't work), and the 3 80GB hard
> >> drives.
> >>
> >> Jim,
> >>
> >> That's what I was afraid of. Only 2 of the drives still work. I
> >> couldn't get any data off the third drive. Do you think raidextract
> >> might still work in this case?
> >>
> >> On Thu, 6 Mar 2014 12:12:53
> >> -0500 Benjie <benjie.godfrey at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>
> >> > 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> 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?
> >> > > _______________________________________________ Ale mailing
> >> > > list Ale at ale.org
> >> > > http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> >> > > See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> >> > > http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
> >> > >
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Ale mailing list
> >> Ale at ale.org
> >> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> >> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> >> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > --
> > James P. Kinney III
> >
> > Every time you stop a school, you will have to build a jail. What
> > you gain at one end you lose at the other. It's like feeding a dog
> > on his own tail. It won't fatten the dog.
> > - Speech 11/23/1900 Mark Twain
> >
> >
> > *http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/
> > <http://heretothereideas.blogspot.com/>*
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > Ale mailing list
> > Ale at ale.org
> > http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> > See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> > http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo
> >
> >