Hi,

I have an old linux machine from several years ago, and it seems to have died (motherboard problems). I have 4 disks that I know I had configured as RAID 0 (actually, to be specific, just JBOD - no striping between disks). I would like to read these disks, but I don't want to get a new system just to find out that some sort of configuration on them is wrong. The boot disk (where all the system files are kept) are a separate, small 5th disk.

What do you recommend is the easiest way to read them? I'd like to not have to buy a whole 'nother tower setup. Is there a solution to read these from a laptop or some other way?

Thanks,
lg

If they have separate filesystems on them you can buy a USB-SATA drive enclosure for about $20 and read them one at a time. If they are combined by dm into a single LVM then you will need to bring them all up in a tower to mount the filesystem.

It's all one filesystem, yes I vaguely recall LVM. I was wondering if it were possible to read them byte by byte into some kind of image on another system like a laptop, and mount those as virtual disks or something like that.

You would need some system to get this data. Unless you can boot this system to a live cd/dvd/usb or pxe/gpxe then you will have to get some other system involved.


I have never tried it but, one might be able to use a dd command to make a bit by bit image of the drive. It may be possible then to use an image mount to then mount the images on some other system.

"JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks)"

We may need to know what type of access or chipset the disks were mounted under.