Broken RAID5 (Perc 3/di EXT2)

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.
ngervasi
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Jan 03, 2011 8:13 pm

Broken RAID5 (Perc 3/di EXT2)

Post by ngervasi » Mon Jan 03, 2011 8:29 pm

Hi,
I just bought your software to try and recover some data from a dead raid5 (3 disks).
The controller was a PERC 3/di embedded in a Dell PowerEdge 2550. After a power failure the BIOS returned to the default setting (no raid, just plain SCSI) and the guy who tried to bring the system up messed around with the Dell utility partition. Now the situation is: disk1 is dead (after several reboots), disk2 and 3 are fine but the Dell utility wrote a Window signature on them. Data should be intact in the 2 remaining disks and all I need to recover is a folder containing 2GB of data or a tgz file that gets created from that data every night.

I managed to get images of disk 2 and 3 to not mess up with the real ones anymore and now I'm trying to reconstruct the raid5 in R-Studio.
I've found that the correct offset is 128 sectors and I tried to use a block size of 64kb and Left Async pattern, so using that I managed to get 2 partitions: swap (1GB) and root (32.89 GB) and some empty space (21.50 MB which I suspect it's not correct but I'm not sure).
R-Studio doesn't show up the filesystem structure unfortunately though, it finds many files and I checked some images and most of them (90%) looks correct (even ones bigger than 128kb) but when I try to recover gzip files all of them are corrupted.
I also tried with 32kb block size and Left Sync pattern but things looks worse.

Question is: do you think that the parameters I'm using are correct?
Is there a way to also recover the directory structure?
Do you have any hints about this scenario? 2 drives out of 3, Linux EXT2/3 filesystem, 2 partitions (swap and root).

Thanks in advance,

Nick

Alt
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Re: Broken RAID5 (Perc 3/di EXT2)

Post by Alt » Tue Jan 04, 2011 11:40 am

Please, wait for a few days for a new version in wich ext2/3/4fs performance is greately improved.

ngervasi
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Jan 03, 2011 8:13 pm

Re: Broken RAID5 (Perc 3/di EXT2)

Post by ngervasi » Tue Jan 04, 2011 12:56 pm

When do you expect to have the new version available? Are there any other hints you can give me in the meantime?

Alt
Site Moderator
Posts: 3129
Joined: Tue Nov 11, 2008 2:13 pm
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Re: Broken RAID5 (Perc 3/di EXT2)

Post by Alt » Tue Jan 04, 2011 4:39 pm

ngervasi wrote:When do you expect to have the new version available?
I think, by the end of this week.
ngervasi wrote:Are there any other hints you can give me in the meantime?
It's hard to say something without seing the actual data. The last resort is a scan for known file types.

ngervasi
Posts: 3
Joined: Mon Jan 03, 2011 8:13 pm

Re: Broken RAID5 (Perc 3/di EXT2)

Post by ngervasi » Thu Jan 13, 2011 5:42 pm

Any news about the new version?

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