RAID 5 please help

[TerraNova]

Lacie RAID 5 with 4 Hard drives (hardware RAID), the unit is no longer recognized and I scanned all drives 1 hdd has bad sectors but not severe, the rest of the hdd are all ok.
I have replaced the bad sector drive hoping it will reconfigure itself but that didnt work.

Tried Raid reconstructor but could not find a suitable RAID configuration ("results insignificant").
I have selected all configuration for block size and parity rotation.

I am hoping someone could help me out. thanks

[mr_spokk]

Hi, in Raid reconstructor did you go by the default numbers of sectors?
If so you might increase those, from 100.000 to 500.000 and see if that helps, sometimes it needs more sectors to determ the right value.

Bosse

[N.C.]

hello,

If you send the pack to me, i can recover for you cheap.
But no easy solution, wich i can simply say.

Janos

[TerraNova]

Bosse, yes i have tried 1000000 and 5000000 didnt find anything significant.

[HDD Spaz]

You sure its RAID 5 not RAID 0 or JBOD? Give more information about the LACIE. Is it a external hard drive (Bigger Disk?)

[CK]

Some of the NAS units have a mirror volume across all 4 drives for the operating system, then a RAID5 with the remainder of the space.

which model is it?

[TerraNova]

it is biggest quadra, yes positive RAID 5

[TerraNova]

is it possible when i scan the drive using irecover to omit the drive with bad sectors? eg. drive 1, 2 and 3 only, drive 4 has bad sectors.

I have also tried getdataback which is quiet confusing and not automatically find the stripe and direction.

[pepe]

Hi,

First thing: create images of the drives on good drives and work with those.
Secondly: Using programs without thinking is not the way RAIDs need to be treated. Sometimes programs can determine the parameters. U can call it a luck.
More often U need to dig really deep into the structures and find out parameters yourself, then feed that to a program, but many times I face parameters so weird that no SW supports. Or the SW available is so damn slow that it is faster to build up mine.
And here comes C++. To implement the actual parameters and build up the system by your own SW.
U cannot take shortcuts in all cases.

pepe

[zed]

TerraNova, I have seen LaCie RAID-5 disks like this before. Have you been able to determine the starting sector? I have also seen some cases where only 3/4 disks are in use and 1 disk is a hot spare, check to ensure 1 disk is not actually blank using a hex editor or X-Ways. The key may be to leave it out.

Also - i usually find the block size to be 128kb for most LaCie disks but have seen the RAID-5 units use 2048Kb in the past too.

[TerraNova]

thanks pepe for the advice, zed i haven't been able to determine the starting sector, i'll check it out using winhex.

[beto]

Deleted incorrect question i forgot was Lacie so its HFS+

[coffeebean]

Terranova,

take advice from pepe,

you must learn how to find raid config manually - in ALL cases.
I mean in each and every case - yes, every case - no, no exceptions.

If you follow this rule you will quickly do raids that idiots can't do.

Using those programs is for those "no data no cost" idiot DR people

Once you got the raid config (manually) you can use anything,
even the RR program has got quite neat (but slooow) capability
to write your own scripts to do any raid configuration.

afaiac the only method to solve any raid is manual process, you will
learn easy quick tricks for each type to build the raid in your head.

success!

[TerraNova]

yes beto its Apple HFS

[hddguy]

I have never seen a RAID-5 in one of these LAcie units. Always RAID 0 or JBOD. Also, RAID Reconstructor I have never got to work with these, and results will usually be insignificant as it is HFS not NTFS. Have you tried XOR test? If it passes XOR test is the results green from the very first sector, or does RAID have a specific header size?

[HDD_MASTER]

These can also have unusually large stripes. From my experience I would recommend not using a RAID 5 config. As HDDGUY states, I have never seen a RAID 5 in these either

[wiseleo]

There are a few things you can try.

I recently recovered a RAID5 with 2 out of 3 disks offline. By the way, I was in California and the drives were in the Middle East. My client was exceptionally smart and had enough hardware for us to image the entire array and to recover the data from that array.

What ultimately worked for me was Raid Reconstructor + GetDataBack. Raid Reconstructor + Captain Nemo almost worked, but not quite.

R-studio did not work as it only recognized half of the array, which led to errors when extracting files telling me that the next file fragment was outside the file system boundaries.

UFS Explorer worked and recognized the array properly, but there were issues. The issues were most likely similar to what I encountered in R-studio, only it didn't warn me of them.

By the way, for the benefit of searchers, this was the Intel Matrix Storage Manager RAID controller.

[pkure]

what kind of file system?

[pkure]

you can use winhex

[TerraNova]

Wiseleo, the manufacturer of the controller is accusys.com.tw, but they are useless if giving any info about their controller.