Raid 5 recovery

[giantbean]

I have a client who relied on an old PII Xeon server. This server had a Raid 5 array made up of 4 SCSI drives, it seems as if 2 of these drives have failed, they have been marked as "defunct" in the controller. We have a SCSI card on the way to attempt to image these drives, as of yet we don't know what shape the failed drives are in. My question is, if we can get good images of these drives, what is the best software to recover the array. I have R-Studio, and need to know if there is a different/better option.

[BlackST]

You mean imaging the 2 "defunct" drives ? First you have to revive them.

[giantbean]

I will find out exactly what kind of shape they are in when I get the card here, we have lots of 68 pin SCSI, but no 80 pin SCSI.

[zebong]

you have two scsi types SCA or LVD.

[Cleanroom]

I would ask the client which one of the two dead drive may of failed first. In my dealing with 2 dead drives in a raid 5 is that 1 always fails and no one ever notices that it failed. Then drive 2 goes and the raid goes down.

if one of the failed drives failed like 6 months ago, that drive is useless for the recovery. So hopefully you can get lucky and repair the right one.

As for software. Winhex is usually the best solution

[DR-Kiev]

I would ask the client which one of the two dead drive may of failed first. In my dealing with 2 dead drives in a raid 5 is that 1 always fails and no one ever notices that it failed. Then drive 2 goes and the raid goes down.

if one of the failed drives failed like 6 months ago, that drive is useless for the recovery. So hopefully you can get lucky and repair the right one.

As for software. Winhex is usually the best solution

I fully agree with this opinion

2 topicstarter

Find and buy SCA80 adapter , like this:

Attachments

sca80.jpg (23.44 KiB) Viewed 4154 times

[giantbean]

That is exactly what I have on order. As far as what order the drives went, this thing sat in a corner, unless something went wrong, nobody looked at it. There is a possibility that the clients children removed the drives without being taken offline(hot swap bays). There were 5 drives in the computer, 4 in an array and one boot drive, out of the 5, 3 are listed as defunct, and it happens to be the top 3, which strikes me as a bit strange. The adapter should show up today so I will have a better idea as to what shape the drives are in when it gets here.