Software RAID-5 Recovery

[bsnaukensu]

Hi... new user here.

I have 3 of 4 drives that were implemented in a software RAID-5 solution. They are each in perfect working order, no bad sectors or anything.

The device which was used to do the RAID-5 was an Intel SS4000-e standalone storage server, which is now dead and returned to manufacturer, unfortunately. The ss4000-e unit is basically a mini headless computer running some sort of linux implementation, which takes care of the RAID.

I have attached each of the drives to my laptop via external enclosures (USB). Each of the drives appears correctly in the Disk Management MMC. The MMC shows that each drive contains 3 volumes, each of type "unknown", and status "Healthy".

Intel has told me that one of the partitioned volumes is of type EXT3, and the data partition is of type XFS. Here is their e-mail:

"md0 is the root partition (operating system). md1 is the data partition.

The chunk size is 64K for Software RAID. (md0 and md1)

The filesystem block size on md0 is 1024. (md0 is ext3 filesystem)

Each filesystem block size on md1 is 4096. (Each share folder on md1 is an xfs filesystem)"

Ok, how do I go about recovering this badboy?

I just ran the "Reconstruct RAID layout, then recover data" option trying all three types of RAID5... the software reports no identifiable volumes. I tell it to discover them automatically, and I am given the option to recover what I believe are files belonging to the linux operating system partition.

It took about 9 hours to complete that task, and now I am back at square one, so I'm seeking advice on what to do before I try another 9 hour operation.

Oh, all the drives are 250gb in size.

Thanks for the help... I love the software so far :-)

Joe

[bsnaukensu]

Here's what one of the drives looks like to the ZAR software.

Joe

[Alexey V. Gubin]

We do not know how to handle XFS anyway. So you will need Linux and Linux experience (of which I have little). I wonder what happens if you have some sort of a linux guru nearby and feed them the same numbers you just provided to me, if you have a guru available?

[bsnaukensu]

Hmm, no gurus around, unfortunately. I live in the far north arctic, so I guess I'm on my own.

I will try to boot from a Knoppix Live CD or something similar and see what sort of access I can get to the data partitions... I don't suppose there is a version of ZAR ported over to *nix?

Thanks anyway for the help.

Joe McCann

[Alexey V. Gubin]

No ZAR for *NIX, we are Windows folks.
Based on my common sense, I see it like this:

You need some working machine with working Linux and all drives attached to it.
There is a linux md tool, which you need to feed the correct information somehow. However, never allow it to rebuild parity on the array (reconstruction). This is important. If you commence parity reconstruction with the drives in wrong order in the array, you lose data.These links seems like they may be relevant
http://man-wiki.net/index.php/4:md
http://man-wiki.net/index.php/8:mdadm#DESCRIPTION
but I have no experience with this.

[Gashapon]

I was able to recover data from XFS with UFS explorer. Maybe you should try.