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Recovering 4-Drive Array - Identifying Parameters

Posted: Thu Oct 05, 2017 5:29 pm
by muzicman82
Hi all,

I have 4x 1TB hard drives that were on a Highpoint RocketRAID 2210 PCI-X card. The array works just fine (I think), but the system the card and drives were in bit the dust. I don't have another PC with a PCI-X slot in it. I've put the drives in another PC one by one and made byte-by-byte dsk images of each.

Unfortunately, I do not even remember if it was a RAID5 or a RAID0 configuration. When setting up the array, I would've just use the default settings for either RAID5 or RAID0... whatever those might be.

Can anyone lend some guidance as far as figuring out what parameters I need to rebuild this? Might reading the drive in HEX view help? Thanks!

Re: Recovering 4-Drive Array - Identifying Parameters

Posted: Fri Oct 06, 2017 8:27 am
by Data-Medics
Cloning the drives is a good first step, so kudos for doing that.

Most RAID controllers store metadata on the drives themselves which is used to remember the RAID configuration. Usually, this is stored at the very end of the drives. This metadata often contains hard drive serial numbers, so the controller might reject cloned drives since the serial numbers don't match.

If the drives are good, my advice would be to keep the clones as a backup, and connect the originals to the controller in the new computer. It'll likely just recognize the array and mount it automatically with no input or configuration required.

If that doesn't work, let me know and we can walk you through how to build a virtual array in R-Studio.

Edit: I just re-read your original post and I see you don't have a computer with a PCI-X slot. So I guess you'll have to build a virtual array.

Re: Recovering 4-Drive Array - Identifying Parameters

Posted: Mon Oct 09, 2017 9:23 am
by Alt
To my understanding, the RAID card uses standard SATA disks, so the original ones can be connected directly to a PC, provided it has enough SATA ports. The speed would be much slower, but still workable.