I have a Raid5 array where the controller card took a dump on me.
I am reasonably sure the drives are in good working condition... and i am looking for a way to get my data back.
The Raid5 array consists of 8 x 1.5 TB SATA drives... the fun part is that the FS is ZFS.
I love ZFS... but since there are no utilities that can rebuild a raid array and read ZFS... I have to get creative.
(Also before I get grief for not using RAIDZ, the only controller I had was an older LSI controller that did not support JBOD... I would not have this issue if I would have used RAIDZ instead)
Getting back to the issue...
I know I will not be able to use R-Studio to fix the array, but I am hoping to recover my files. The seach for files feature seems to work as it does find a large amoun of my small files (jpgs that did not span a drive).
I read the recovery guide, and the finding raid parameters guys, but honestly, they are hard to follow... especially if you do not have an NTFS FS to follow along with.
Here is what I think I know...
I know there are either 8 drives or 6 drives (more about this below)
I know it is a Raid 5 Array
I think the block size is 128K (I was able to recover that from the raid controller config... but i am only about 90% sure it is right)
Here is what I don't know...
I don't know the Disk Order
I don't know the Raid Offset
I don't know the Block Order
I followed the raid parameter guide as best as I could and I gathered the following informaiton using the MBR search technique:
Drive ID Location of MBR's first byte
PD0 2c186a55
PD1 2de00b38
PD2 7430ef21
PD3 2de00b38
PD4 2c1b9255
PD5 2c1c3201
PD6 2c189a01
PD7 a9bdf055
It seems that two of the drives have a huge variance in comparison to the other six drives... i don't know if that makes any difference. There is a possibility that PD1 failed and was pulled from the array (it's SMART statistics do not look good).
There is a possibility that PD2 and PD7 were not acutally members of the array, I cannot recall how much space the full array had... and this was setup a long time ago.
I don't know where go next. I used escel to sort the data above and got the following results (which I thought might be my disk order)
Drive ID Location of MBR's first byte
PD0 2c186a55
PD6 2c189a01
PD4 2c1b9255
PD5 2c1c3201
PD1 2de00b38
PD3 2de00b38
PD2 7430ef21
PD7 a9bdf055
I tried that and it did not seem to work (I could read most jpgs that were smaller than 128K, but nothing larger).
Any help would be appreciated. I am ready and willing to purchase R-Studio if it can help me recover some of my lost data. There are years of family files on there that I would hate to lose. I am in the process of building a new SAN/NAS at home and this one bit the dust just a little too soon (Murpy's Law
![Razz :-P](./images/smilies/icon_razz.gif)