raid 5 images

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.
terem1
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raid 5 images

Post by terem1 » Sat Jul 14, 2018 10:18 am

I have raid5 on 5 drives. dell Perc h710. Now this array is degraded, at least 3 drives have serious problems. I am going to make disk images of all drives, then we are going try data recovery tools on these images.

But I can't move and attach the drives to another hardware. Perc h710 doesn't allow to direct access to the drives, so we can't do separete disk images now.

The only thing I can do is to create single disk raid0 for every disk separatelly (I assume this will only overwrite raid metadata, but won't affect existing data until nothing is being written to the disk), and then to take the images all of them.
Is it good idea? Do you think r-studio will be able reconstruct anything from such images?

Alt
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Re: raid 5 images

Post by Alt » Sat Jul 14, 2018 1:11 pm

I'm not sure at all. Usually any type of RAID recreation does destroy some data on the disk. Dell instructions hint that if RAID initialization has been skipped, some previous data may remain, but I repeat, I'm not aware of that at all.
I'd resort this procedure only if and when there's no other options and with full understanding that the data may be lost completely.
Manually, R-Studio can create any RAID type of any objects, but when it knows RAID parameters. In your case some can be seen in the Configuration utility, some has to be guessed.

Data-Medics
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Re: raid 5 images

Post by Data-Medics » Sat Jul 14, 2018 7:16 pm

Perc h710 doesn't allow to direct access to the drives, so we can't do separete disk images now.
What is it going to jump out of the case and attack you if you try to remove the drives? The secret is, you take them out and image them individually. RAID recovery is NEVER though the original controller, EVER!!!
The only thing I can do is to create single disk raid0 for every disk separatelly
Not a good idea. That'll overwrite the metadata which will make the recovery harder for the lab you're likely to ultimately end up sending it to. My typical pricing for degraded RAID arrays is around $325/drive. Once I hear the words "rebuilt" referring to the array or tinkering with it trying to recover through the card, that number starts multiplying.

I think you really should consider getting pro help on this one. If you mess up and make an amateur mistake, you'll probably make recovery impossible permanently.

Alt
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Re: raid 5 images

Post by Alt » Sun Jul 15, 2018 12:48 pm

I'd treat the words of Data-Medics quite seriously.

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