Mac Pro RAID Card parameters

Discussions on using the professional data recovery program R-STUDIO for RAID re-construction, NAS recovery, and recovery of various disk and volume managers: Windows storage spaces, Apple volumes, and Linux Logical Volume Manager.
igorsa12
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Joined: Wed Oct 06, 2010 7:15 pm

Mac Pro RAID Card parameters

Post by igorsa12 » Wed Oct 06, 2010 9:01 pm

There are zillions of different RAID cards vendors, which are using different settings for different RAID configurations, with exception of ONE - Apple. Apple has only TWO cards, which support the INTERNAL MAC PRO RAID - black card (for Mac Pro early 2009 and later) and the original - blue card (for Mac Pro up to early 2008, which is Mac3.1).
Two simple questions: 1. Why there are NOTHING regarding Apple files restoration (templates, etc) in R-Studio for Mac? (!!!)
2. Who knows standard Drive order, Offset, Block Size, Block order for these cards? These parameters, opposite to other vendors, Apple establishes "by default", never asking us, users, what we want. It means these data are constant and we, users, will be so glad to get it from R-TT engineers or other R-TT Forum users.

Thank you in advance!

Dr. Igor, who, btw, like R-Studio very much...

Alt
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Re: Mac Pro RAID Card parameters

Post by Alt » Thu Oct 07, 2010 10:39 am

1. This is a good point. We'll correct it in the nearest future.
2. Maybe, the Mac tech support can help? Btw, if you get these parameters, please share it with us here.

igorsa12
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Joined: Wed Oct 06, 2010 7:15 pm

Re: Mac Pro RAID Card parameters

Post by igorsa12 » Mon Oct 11, 2010 9:10 pm

Well,

I have a plan, and appreciate your comments and suggestions.

1. I have installed OS 10.6 on a separate independent OWC SSD (200GB) together with R-Studio and some other software. This disk is my major OS disk now. I have around 100GB free space on this drive. I have MacPro3,1 with 32GB of RAM.
2. I additionally have installed OS X and a few JPEG files of different size (from a few kB to tens of MB) on a separate ST31000340NS connected to the motherboard HD controller (10 GB partition size). Then - I created a bit-to-bit image of this partition on my SSD.
3. I run R-Studio and scanned this image. Now I can see HFS+ and EFI partitions and my JPEG pictures - to be sure everything is OK, and not only - I can see the right structure of the partitions, offset and so on.
4. Next step - to install the same (OS + JPEG) to a disk connected to Apple RAID card as JBOD, create an image on the SSD and take a look is it any difference btw the image of the HD connected to the controller and to the RAID card.
5. Now I have to install the same stuff (OS and JPEG) on RAID 5 using Apple RAID card, to create four images on the SSD. Then - to create RAID 5 using these images, and to perform an analysis with attempt to get at least some of these parameters.

I am planning to finish this experiment in a week or so. This experiment will give me a clean picture of initial data distribution, and, I hope, at least better understanding what else to do to save my data: my RAID 5 with four ST31000340NS failed as the result of this famous Seagate SN4 firmware problem, when HD suddenly - from the blue - stops reacting to any controller commands, pretending to be dead. In reality - all data are still intact, but without any ability to reach them until you upgrade the disc firmware to SN6 or SN16. But your RAID controller starts recognize the upgraded disk as a new one, not as a part of the RAID. This is my case.

Any suggestions?

Best regards,

Dr. Igor S. Alexandrov

Alt
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Re: Mac Pro RAID Card parameters

Post by Alt » Tue Oct 12, 2010 6:49 am

Your plan seems OK to me. Btw, you can copy the partition directly to the newly created RAID to be sure the partition on the RAID is exactly the same as the original one. See the R-Studio Help for details.

How many disks have eventually faulted? Because if it's one, you should still have the access to the RAID.

igorsa12
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Re: Mac Pro RAID Card parameters

Post by igorsa12 » Tue Oct 12, 2010 7:02 am

I don't know exactly what happened - RAID controller does recognize the RAID but saying that the RAID has problems. You do know this stile - no other data. Looks more like Windows than Apple. One disk from 4 is roaming. That's it...
As for partition copy, to restore the RAID using your suggestion I have to have exact the same partition structure, which actually I am trying to restore. Bootstraps case...

Anyway, thank you for the reply.

Best regards,

Dr. Igor

roseau
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Joined: Thu Feb 10, 2011 3:16 am

Re: Mac Pro RAID Card parameters

Post by roseau » Thu Feb 10, 2011 3:31 am

Hello,
I'm trying to recover an apple raid which have lost is partition map
I have found with raidutil command that:
Blocksize : 1mb
stipedepth : 10
which mine that raid have a structure as:
pp B1 C1
pp B2 C2
A1 PP C3
A2 pp C4
A3 B3 pp
A4 B4 PP
I haven't found offset
But boot map for volumes begin at the 409640 sector
meaning that +- 400 mb are reserved at the begining for efi partition and other

Have you found the same parameters?

R-studio have difficultes to recover this kind of raid!!

best regard

DataICU
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Joined: Sat Feb 19, 2011 7:23 pm

Re: Mac Pro RAID Card parameters

Post by DataICU » Sat Feb 19, 2011 7:35 pm

igorsa12 wrote:There are zillions of different RAID cards vendors, which are using different settings for different RAID configurations, with exception of ONE - Apple. Apple has only TWO cards, which support the INTERNAL MAC PRO RAID - black card (for Mac Pro early 2009 and later) and the original - blue card (for Mac Pro up to early 2008, which is Mac3.1).
Two simple questions: 1. Why there are NOTHING regarding Apple files restoration (templates, etc) in R-Studio for Mac? (!!!)
2. Who knows standard Drive order, Offset, Block Size, Block order for these cards? These parameters, opposite to other vendors, Apple establishes "by default", never asking us, users, what we want. It means these data are constant and we, users, will be so glad to get it from R-TT engineers or other R-TT Forum users.

Thank you in advance!

Dr. Igor, who, btw, like R-Studio very much...

Dr. Igor:

Have you had any success with this issue. I am currently working a 4-drive Mac RAID 5 on the Blue card.

DataICU

Alt
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Re: Mac Pro RAID Card parameters

Post by Alt » Mon Feb 21, 2011 4:08 am

Unfortunately, Apple doesn't share such information with its users.

neustadt
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Joined: Sun Jun 09, 2013 3:03 pm

Re: Mac Pro RAID Card parameters

Post by neustadt » Sun Jun 09, 2013 3:22 pm

Hi

are there any news on this topic?

I am thinking about creating NTFS as a filesystem onto a Apple Card RAID5. Because there are a few instructions on the web, on how to recover the needed parameters through NTFS. But I am not sure, if I the Apple RAID Utility will allow me to create a 3rd party filesystem.
If someone could point me to instructions on how to do this via HFS+, that would be great.

Another question I have is: If I assamble a virtual RAID over my drives with no specific parameters other than RAID level 5 and scan through the whole array, R-Studio can restore very few files based on IntelliRAW search. Does this mean R-Studio found the RAID parameters by itself? On the one hand if the RAID is not understood for R-Studio, how can files be recoverd? On the other hand, maybe thats how IntelliRAW works. Files get reconstructed by putting all the available bytefragments from all the harddrives together.

Alt
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Re: Mac Pro RAID Card parameters

Post by Alt » Mon Jun 10, 2013 6:45 am

I didn't work much with Apple systems, so this my question: does these RAID controller allow you to specify your own RAID parameters? If yes, you may browse through them without actual change. Usually, those parameters start from their default values.

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