RAID 5 problem, winhex and forensics crashes

[TerraNova]

Hi Guys

I have RAID 5 with 4 hdd, one of them has bad sectors, trying to scan using winhex and forensics bith found the data and trying to recover/copy, the winhex/forensics crashes. Tried scanned just 3 hdd ignoring the bad sector hdd, same results.

PS. R-studio crashes as well.

Anyone got similar experience?

thanks

[TerraNova]

Anyone know what is the default RAID configuration for
ASUS A8N32-SLI RAID?

thanks

[HDD Spaz]

Clone the bad drive. Also try UFS explorer.

[BlackST]

Ditto. Work on an image of the "bad" drive with a healthy drive. The drive likely stops responding or so.

[TerraNova]

thanks guys, will try

[TerraNova]

Is the order of the RAID 5 hard drives important? What i mean by "the order" is when the customer pulled out the SATA hdd (4 of them) , he didnt mark which SATA drive goes to which hard drive. I was wondering is it possible to place all the hdd back to the original RAID motherboard randomly and see if that works. Correct me if i am wrong RAID 5 with 4 hdd, 1 has bad sectors, it means I could just simple connect 3 HDD?

[scratchy]

Is the order of the RAID 5 hard drives important? What i mean by "the order" is when the customer pulled out the SATA hdd (4 of them) , he didnt mark which SATA drive goes to which hard drive. I was wondering is it possible to place all the hdd back to the original RAID motherboard randomly and see if that works.

This will depend on how the RAID config information is stored. Some store configuration informaiton on the HDD so you can put the drives in any order - the controller will detect and re-order the config accordingly, some sotore it in RAM on the controller.

Some controllers/sw RAID systems will require the drives to be in the correct order.

Correct me if i am wrong RAID 5 with 4 hdd, 1 has bad sectors, it means I could just simple connect 3 HDD?

I think you are correct.. RAID 5 should run in 'degraded mode' with the drive missing, or you could plug an EMPTY drive in to the controller and see if it rebuilds, but many controllers require a spare to be installed at the controller level- so it knows it can use it to rebuild.

If you are in recovery, you can remove the drive and use your software to virtually rebuild the missing drive during recovery.

[Zorb]

No, a RAID controller should rebuild no matter what once you add a replacement drive. If it's a cheap or onboard controller, the order likely matters. Not sure how Nvidia RAID does it. NVidia NForce RAID may write a header onto the drive, though the first version just kept the drive serial numbers in its flash memory so if the drives were reordered it would adjust for it. Either way, there are only so many stripe sizes supported, so if you keep playing with it and the order of the drives, you will get it eventually with the three good drives.

There are only 24 orders that it can go in, and only half a dozen at most stripe sizes, but that should be pretty easy to determine in advance, just find a block of a known structure and see how far it goes before getting cut off. Look for a piece of the content of ntldr (If it's a Windows NT machine) or something, or just be sure you bill by the hour, though you should be able to work on other projects at the same time.
1 2 3 4, 1 2 4 3, 1 3 2 4, 1 3 4 2, 1 4 2 3, 1 4 3 2, 2 1 3 4, 2 1 4 3, 2 3 1 4, 2 3 4 1,
2 4 1 3, 2 4 3 1, 3 1 2 4, 3 1 4 2, 3 2 1 4, 3 2 4 1, 3 4 1 2, 3 4 2 1, 4 1 2 3, 4 1 3 2,
4 2 1 3, 4 2 3 1, 4 3 1 2, 4 3 2 1