Hi guys

I have a RAID 5 with 3 hdd, 1 of the drive has bad sectors so the windows would not boot up. I tried RAID reconstructor and when i analyzed it kept saying "This Result is not significant" what did i do wrong?

I have enetered 3 drives accordingly Drive 1, 2 and 3.
Start sector of the RAID on each individual drive: 63 (not sure but i have tried 0 and 63 both didnt work out)
Block size : 256
Parity rotation: default (forward 1-2-3)

Thanks for any help.

Are you sure the disk order and block size you are using are correct?

If you are unsure of the starting sector but you can guess the block size, 64KB and 128 KB are popular - try R-Studio's RAI-5 feature and then scan the whole virtual stripe - it will give you the result even if you do not know the starting sector. It may be something unusual or the disks may be in an incorrect order.

Good luck!

thanks zed

Mostly, you can't recover RAID 5 using the "try any key" and press "continue" method.
sure, it works sometimes using raid reconstructor. Then your work should charge your
customer accordingly.

You must always get :

Stripe size : by visual analysis or many other options.

RAID start : Normally partition information will give answer.

Order : This you can establish by manual analysis of some relevant large file
like .txt or better some .log file

Configuration : Almost always during manual re-creation of some .log file you will get RAID configuration.

I get a lot of RAID 5 from previous "experts" failing to solve and almost always they have stripe size
not equal to 64K, so it seems "experts" try 64K stripe size, start sector 0 and press some keys for solution.

So you must learn to solve RAID 5 using manual analysis of images in R-Studio or some hex viewer.
Then you will succeed with just about every RAID job.

afaiac R-Studio and Winhex not so useful for "click and try" solution, they very good
and so is RR when you know for sure the complete RAID configuration.

You can use rr to write your own scripts for special configurations which most "click and try"
softwares don't employ.

So rr is very powerful and can solve any RAID problem, if you learn how.

What controller? Was it software raid?

PROMISE

Hi utdr,

you asked a question about controller and software.
Now you got an answer, how does help your next answer ?

A good RAID expert wrote many years ago (advice to user)

If "expert" asks you for controller or requires delivery of controller
or RAID case, don't use this "expert" - he don't know what he is going
to do with your RAID.

So many years, so many raids solved, never once asked client what
controller and what software / hardware RAID type.

One question to ask user or RAID owner :

Who if anyone did you send the RAID before me ?

What did you do after RAID first crashed ?

How long since the RAID failure ?

These questions can help a little.

btw. If you don't know how to identify software or hardware RAID
in a few seconds from hex view then better to try some other keyria.

Hi coffeebean, the reason I asked the controller is because what people often miss is the stripping offset. Some controllers reserve the beginning for configuration information. I also disagree that the controller does not matter. It can save you time in determining the rotation of the parity and if there is an offset of the stripping. If I were the one doing the recovery then I would look for the boot sector with winhex to find if there is an offset. I don't think that there is an offset with promise.

Hi utdr,

You wrote ,


You prove my point, you just think...maybe, perhaps, but not for sure.

Solution results from 100% dead certainty of situation.

hello coffeebean, if what you are trying to prove is that you have more experience than I do, I will not argue with you. Does this mean that I should not try and help TerraNova?