I'm usually pretty quick to figure out RAID arrays, but this one is a real head-scratcher. It uses an Adapted AIC-9410w controller. After cloning all current/former member drives I've connected the good drives to the card and it clearly shows a RAID6-RS array running on 4 out of 5 members and stripe size of 512Kb. One of the two virtual volumes even mounts, it's just the other one I need to recover (but unfortunately some of MFT is unreadable through the card after a failed rebuild) so I need to build it in UFS Explorer.

So I know I'm working with 4 of 5 drives that contain at least one healthy file system, but for the life of me I can't get the config right. I've literally tried every possible iteration of drive order as left-sym, left-asym. right-sym, right-asym and none are correct.\

I've done entropy analysis and it definitely looks like an RS rotation P + Q parity, not the older Adaptec proprietary RAID 6 (although I tried every iteration of building it that way too just for good measure).

I'm guessing it's something stupid like a Q before P or some other factor that's outside the norm, but I'm in a bit of a time crunch, so any clues someone might have would be a real help. Anyone have notes on a case with this card?

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

data-medics,
RAW search on each member and see how the MFT records alternate.
The order of blocks can be delayed or in non-classical order, of type 103254

Figuring out drive order isn't my issue, the problem is there is something non-standard with the RAID. The drive order is fairly obvious, and easy enough with only 5 drives.

I'm not exactly sure what you are referring to by type 103254... can you expound more on that block rotation?

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company

data-medics,
MFT records will be out of order. For example, with a block of 64 sectors of three disks:


With the right order:

Moreover, the order can be violated only for XOR blocks.
And the rest will be in the correct order.
RAW search can show this on an incorrectly assembled raid

The case is now solved thanks to my good friend Yuriy of UFS Explorer . It turns out it was a pretty standard RAID 6 but one drive was out of sync and didn't belong (despite the fact that the controller showed it as a part of the array when re-connected). That was what was throwing me off the whole time.

Many thanks to Yuriy!!! And to any of you guys out there using a bootleg copy of his software, please buy the software and support this gem of a human being!

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Data Medics - Hard Drive, SSD, and RAID Data Recovery Service Company