Hi guys,

I'm looking to recover a RAID1 array hopefully using mdadm. Ive not really used Linux much befor but I'm keen to learn to get my data back. Basically one of the disks in my Maxtor Shared Storage II (2x500GB sata) died and I could do with either rebuilding the array or getting the data off another way.

I have a spare machine I could use for recovery process. It has a spare drive but its only 120Gig, I also have a bigger 320gig disk but thats IDE not SATA. Do I need to purchase another 500GB sata drive or can I use either of my spares? If i do need to buy a new drive could I use a 1TB or 1.5TB or will it have to be 500?

Next question is what is that best version of linux to use, I have knoppix 6.2 and Ubuntu (not sure on version) already. I noticed that mdadm isn't installed by default on Ubuntu.

Thanks for any help in getting this project going.

Buzza.

What does the Maxtor Shared Storage II have to do with mdadm? The Maxtor Shared Storage II doesn't appear to use any kind of raid at all, even though it says it does on the box. It appears that the drives are formatted with ext3. So the only way to recover would be to try to read the drive and copy any data off of it. There is a good tool for this called ddrescue. http://www.google.com/search?source=...=Google+Search

If you don't have any linux machines to install ddrescue on then knoppix would probably be your best bet. Take a machine and pull the hard drives out of it and install the bad hard drive and a new hard drive that is greater than or equal to the size of the old bad hard drive into this machine. Put knoppix cd in and start up the computer. Run the ddrescue commands (see google link) from the knoppix console to copy the old drive to the new one.

The drives will probably be at /dev/sda or /dev/sdb. Use smartctl -a /dev/sda to see info about a drive to make sure you will know which drive is the old one and which one is the new one. (the last thing you would want to do is copy the blank drive on to the bad drive and wipe all data)