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Manually-Confirgured Software RAID Under NT?

Posted by Cliff on from the funny-how-it-used-to-mean-"bug-spray" dept.

Mandoric asks: "I recently had a RAID-0 array die due to the controller refusing to recognize it as anything but a pair of single drives. Are there any software RAID programs (preferably under NT, as it's an NTFS partition I'd be restoring) that allow manual entry of a preexisting array's stripe size, rather than forcing all stripe data to be rewritten before reading from an array? Or ways to modify the volume data of an existing program to do this?" Are there decent RAID tools, for either NT or for Unix, that will allow one to recover from errors such as this?

3 of 31 comments (clear)

  1. Software Fault Tolerance by dhopton · · Score: 2, Interesting

    NT4 and above have always supported software RAID, most commonly RAID-0, and in the server editions RAID-1 too (I think it did some others, I'm not sure).

    Neither of these will help since you are having to recover the data, and even so the hardware controller may have a differant format to the NT one etc (same goes for any controller).

    I think the best solution, if you dont have a backup is talk to the people like Ontrack - they can recover almost anything.

  2. Resource Kit by Dunkirk · · Score: 2, Interesting

    There was a resource kit utility to open up software RAID sets and fix them under NT/2000. I have played with it only to see what it does, and that was years ago. It was made for exactly what you're talking about doing.

    However...

    I don't think that's a good idea. I don't think you're going to get done in software what the hardware was doing for you. If the data is truly sacred, I think one of the other posters was correct: go to a data-recovery service and let a professional do it. If the data is only partly holy, then try finding a utility from the controller maker.

    dk

    --
    Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
  3. with Linux? by chtephan · · Score: 2, Interesting

    How does NT stripe? Some blocks on the first disk, some blocks on the next, some on the first, ... without any metadata at the beginning?

    Then this should be fairly easy. Find out which block size is used, boot from some linux rescue CD and initialize a software raid without persistent superblock. After that you should be able to mount the NTFS partition (at least for reading) and copy everything off it.

    If there is some data before the actual partition, you can use the loop device with the offset parameter to skip the junk.