A friend of mine brought us three drives used for a failing RAID-5 set (built using a Silicon Image 3114-card). One of the drives was mirrored without any problems (and failed completely afterwards), the second drive was dead as a doornail and the third drive was mirrored after a 10 day session with ddrescue. We therefore have the prerequisites to be able to recreating the set. I have not yet tried to use the PCI-card to rebuild the set, as I lack two working 500GB drives, so at this moment I've only been trying to rebuild it using DMDE with not-so-great results.
According to the Silicon Image-manual, the standard values for creating a RAID5 set is by using 64k blocks (see page 14 in attached pdf).
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Running DMDE v4 on Windows and try to auto-guess the setup, the best match it could find was 4k-blocks, while DMDE v3.6 on Linux it claimed it to be 128k-blocks. Investigating both results, we clearly see NTFS-headers and a lot of MFT-blocks are found, meaning we can extract the full directory information.
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This somehow seems to be a false positive, making me thinking the analyze went great, because when trying to actually extract the files we receive skewed data and can see 1% of jpg-images at best. Very small jpg-files, such as 20 year old photos in 640*480, are extracted in full but the homemade videos etc are completely botched. This makes me think that DMDE had a hard time figuring out how the Silicon Image-chip produced the parity blocks, and thus it's not useful.
That leaves me the second option by using the actual PCI-card in a machine and try to rebuild the set in its BIOS. However, this is something I've never done before and I'm not sure how to proceed, so I have some questions:
1. Can we use any kind of 500GB-drives and restore the cloned images to them before rebuilding, or do I need the exact same kind of drives?
2. Do we need three drives, or will two drives be sufficient to a) activate the set, b) back it up immediately?
3. Based on the information in the manual (see attached file), is it possible to use that in DMDE to be able to recreate the set without the hardware?