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Another RAID 5 saga

Posted: Sat Aug 15, 2009 9:57 am
by cisco32544
Current setup is 3x1.5TB Seagates (CC1H) w/t Adaptec 3085 controller. I was having problems with drives dropping from the raid (which I attribute to 1.5TB not being supported well by the card) so I ran the SeaTools Long DST on two of the three drives on a different computer. The RAID computer was powered off for a few days but now when I plug the drives back in, only one drive is recognized as being part of the RAID, the others showed up as optimal but not members of the logical drive. I don't have that much experience with RAIDs and the data was not super important so I decided to delete the logical drive and planned on recreating it using the "Skip initialization" option. I tried that but it gave me an error saying something about no free space avail and then failed to create the logical drive.

Now all three drives are hooked up via my motherboard's ICH10R controller and I'm trying to create a virtual raid using R-STUDIO. I have no idea what any of the options are supposed to be, except for the stripe size of 256kb. I've been looking everywhere trying to find drive order offset etc... but no luck. I selected the defaults and ran a scan but the only partition that was green showed up starting at 128.08MB which didn't seem right to me, does that seem legit to anyone else? All the jpegs I tried to open show up as blocks of random pictures (drive order? stripe size?) Anyone have any suggestions? I'm ready to be done with this Adaptec card, and move everything to my new Areca.

Thanks,
Tim

Re: Another RAID 5 saga

Posted: Sun Aug 16, 2009 7:41 am
by Alt
What does "blocks of random pictures" mean? A total mess, or a picture consisting of valid image parts but in wrong order, like a puzzle incorrectly assembled?
Maybe this article can help: http://www.data-recovery-software.net/A ... ndex.shtml

Re: Another RAID 5 saga

Posted: Sun Aug 16, 2009 8:44 am
by cisco32544
I checked out that link the other day but I'll go over it again. A couple of things to clarify, as far as the pictures, the only ones that load have stripes of sky but I think they're from the wrong picture, they look incomplete though since they only show the sky. I also realized that when I pick certain settings in r-studio a basic partition shows up under the virtual raid with the correct volume label as the original raid had, only the size shows up as 746.4GB and not the full 2.73TB. Interestingly two of the three 1.5TB drives show up under windows disk manager as 2.7TB drives with drive letters and "healthy" and the third shows up as correctly as 1.3TB unallocated with no drive letter assigned. I'm guessing the one that shows up as unallocated is the drive that begins with parity data.

Re: Another RAID 5 saga

Posted: Sun Aug 16, 2009 9:29 am
by Alt
I think you'd rather try to follow that "Finding RAID parameters" presentation to find correct RAID parameters. Windows often "recognizes" wrong partitions on disks from RAIDs.

Re: Another RAID 5 saga

Posted: Sun Aug 16, 2009 11:26 am
by cisco32544
So far I've found GPT partitions at sector 1 on two of the drives, the third has nothing. I'm scanning for the NTFS sector now but so far the only drive that seems to have one is the one without the GPT partition record (the third drive), seems rather odd, on this drive the NTFS boot sector is located at sector 131106.

Re: Another RAID 5 saga

Posted: Mon Aug 17, 2009 12:58 pm
by Alt
Frankly speaking, I can suggest only one thing - just try all possible combinations of disk and block orders. That would be much easier than trying to dig into mazes of NTFS data structures.
As soon as you find a correct RAID layout, R-Studio should find a valid partition. See that Apply immediately is selected.

Re: Another RAID 5 saga

Posted: Mon Aug 17, 2009 5:28 pm
by cisco32544
I tried that, r-studio found a valid partition with the correct volume label but the size was only about 750GB instead of the correct 2.73TB. At anyrate I've given up, the data wasn't that important and can be recreated. In the end I figured I would spend the same amount of time recovering the data as I would just recreating it.

I think I really screwed things up for myself when I used the Adaptec Storage Manager to delete the logical drive when it only recognized the one disk as part of the raid. Had I not done that I think everything would have worked out. I've migrated the last of my disks over to my new Areca controller and so far everything is good.