this post was submitted on 08 Sep 2023
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Recovering Hardware RAID array in software (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I have 3 old SCSI HDDs that were in a hardware RAID, I don't have the RAID controller anymore but I have imaged them with DD and a SCSI PCI card I have.
Is there any way to assemble this array in software on Linux? I just want to get the data off so read only is fine.
Running blkid on the drive shows it as an Adaptec RAID member.
I believe the drives are in RAID 5.

EDIT: I got it working, but I had to use windows. I installed ReclaiMe Free RAID Recovery to find the RAID parameters then used the UFS explorer Pro free trial to image the array to a virtual disk. After a quick (actual quite long) chkdsk I managed to mount the NTFS file system on the array

EDIT2: There seem to be a lot of missing files, I don't think there was anything important on here anyway

EDIT3: wow, the found.000 folder is huge. I guess the recovery failed, or the array got pretty badly corrupted on the ~10 years in storage.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Try dmraid, it's been designed to take over various formats of hardware RAID cards.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It recognised the disks in an ASR array, but the type is "unknown" and it fails to assemble with "Undefined RAID type (null)[1] on asr_". So I don't think that worked sadly.
EDIT: The RAID card I had supported RAID 5 and dmraid doesn't, that's probably why it's not working.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I think you may just be able to run mdadm --discover and follow your nose. I haven't gone digging enough to find good documentation.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I tried that once from off of an HP raid controller and got nada. I hope it works for OP.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I could not find a --discover parameter, but I tried --assemble --scan and it couldn't find a super block.
It feels a bit frustrating to have all the data here but no way to access it, maybe a tool will pop up at some point if I hoard the disk images.
Thanks for the suggestion though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

update: I managed to get it working, look at the edit

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Thank you for sharing updates about your progress. Good luck rummaging around in found.000. :(