Hello, I have a Fujitsu ETERNUS2000 RAID 5 with 4 seagate ST3300656SS drives, I can see and verify all drive with the SAS card BIOS, when I attemt to image the drive I get an error message that can't read sector 0 I/O error, the 3 different cards I used pass all test as healthy drives. I can see the physical drive under windows but I get the same error message when attempting to open any of the drive with winhex. My suspicion is that the sector sized are bigger that 512 but I haven't be able to find any utility that will let me access the data area of the drive. Does anyone have any idea why Im getting this symptoms? Has anyone has seeing this Fujitsu Disk array blade?

Thank you

I briefly saw, but never worked on, that array when it was released 4-5 years ago. So until you get a reply from someone who does know more about it, I'll just briefly add a couple of comments:


I worked on some old HBA BIOS code (many years ago!) which would verify a drive - the great advantage of the SBC Verify command, is that it doesn't need to worry about the block size (since the data isn't sent back to the host) and, indeed, that BIOS code did work with disks formatted to 520 bytes per block, as used on IBM AS/400 systems. Therefore the fact that you report the BIOS code can verify the disk, but a normal program reports errors when trying to read 512 bytes, could indeed mean that this isn't the block size.

Do you get any sense data, from whatever tool you are using when you try (and fail) to read the disk?


That's certainly possible - Fujitsu did report that array used something called "block guard" or "data block guard" IIRC, which I think used 520 byte blocks (i.e. 8 extra bytes containing something like an MD5 of the LBA, so that the RAID controller can detect when a mis-directed write or read has happened - that sort of thing).

If you have a tool which can send arbitrary commands to a disk, then the block size will be reported in Mode Page 3 and/or Read Capacity responses, depending on whether the disk f/w dropped support for Mode Page 3 or not (some recent disks have dropped that support). Other approaches are possible, but also depend on what s/w you have, to send commands to the disk. I don't claim to be a RAID recovery expert, but I hope the comments help. Good luck!

Probably your drives locked.

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Angel Data Recovery

Thank you for the reply, I figure that the drive get locked by the controller card, I had to get the can in-house break the raid and then I was able to image the drive. Cheers group

From your first post, I thought you'd already tried this - hence your first comment of "I can see and verify all drive with the SAS card BIOS". That sounded like you were already accessing the individual drives. If you were still accessing the drives through the RAID controller at the time of your first post, then all bets were off...