I've used WinHex on some really screwed up raid jobs before, but this problem I'm having now is nuts. It's a 4-drive array. The biggest problem is the fact that the customer doesn't know any of the parameters associated with the RAID array. It came out of a Dell Poweredge 2850, using a Perc controller. From past experience, I believe these controllers have the stripe set up at 128 sectors and a backward, dynamic parity. Is this correct?

The array lost the configuration, and they were unable to recreate it. From what I was told, it started to rebuild but couldn't. I have gone through a host of utilities that I use in cases like this, Raid Reconstructor can't determine the stripe, R-Studio finds numerous partitions, and the one that actually contains the right file structure and data, is completely full of corruption.

Having just really started to find out how powerful WinHex is, I was hoping that maybe it could help out. I have used it on a couple of jobs with absolutely remarkable results.

However, whenever I connect these drives, I have drive 1-4 opened in numerical order, but I realize this could be different than the actual drive order for the controller. I have it at 128 sectors, and backward, dynamic but it doesn't display any partition information at all.

I will note that while all 4 original drives are 80gb each, the 1st drive was actually cloned onto a 120gb, so I don't know if that makes any difference or not. I know when I go to open them WinHex says: "The Components Are Not Identical In Size".

When the drives open, no partitions display, it just says "unparitionable space 7.5mb" and below that "unpartitioned space 224GB".

I don't know if there is anything else I can do with this. About 2 million sectors down I start seeing some text, and parts of emails, and various data, so some of it seems to be intact. I don't know what that would make the header size for something like this. Whenever I do a "find by file type", all of the data comes back corrupted. I don't know if this is because I might be slightly off on the stripe setting, or should I change the drive order around, or what. Any help or advise would be appreciated. Thanks.

Your first major problem is the fact that the disks aren't all the same size. Winhex doesn't like this at all.

You could try extracting an image of all four drives, and creating a virtual raid from that. It should be possible to extract identical-size images for all four.

Remember with RAID 5 that you only need three of the four drives to recover. Try Winhex without the odd-size drive.

I'd also be inclined to try forward parity with 128 sectors.

Hi - You have to make sure that the MBR and partitions match up with the striping and configuration. Make sure that when assembled, the MBR is at sector zero. Then read the MBR and make sure the partition starts where the MBR expects it to start.

for the configuration, you might call the manufacturer - or read the configuration of the original server. You can also guess using WinHex. There is a tool called RAID Reconstructor that tries all the typical configuration combinations.

Hope that helps.

A

You can use the HPA command in MHDD to limit the 120GB to 80GB. If you are working with a windows RAID then you could try Raid Reconstructor from Runtime software