We had this problem with a raid5 that couldn't be brought back to life at the office. After some research, I found nothing I could use to rebuild the "original" image from the separate images, so I decided to program one, and so I did (with java. Had I used C, I would still be coding. ). It didn't take so long. It's a cli application. It's not bullet proof (just made it for a very straight forward purpose), but it certainly got the job done. I was able to recover 60 gbs of data from a 5-disk raid5 (and then mounting the image as a HD with the help of losetup ).

I guess with some more research it could become a very good recovery tool... and even be used to "mount" broken raid partitions on linux. Don't know.

What do you think? Should I open source it? Maybe post it in sourceforge?

Sure thing, I don't see a reason why not.

Hi, did you ever publish your raid recovery software?

If not, do you have any advice for someone grappling with piecing together a 12 disk mylex hardware raid5 array after the hardware controller blew up?

I started writing a program in PERL to piece the data back together from a few "key" files I had stored on a disk(floppy). I was able to scan the 12 32Gb images I made of the drives from the array to identify the direction of the stripe, but it's taken me over a year to manually piece that back together by comparing the script output in a HEX editor and guessing at the order of the disks. I've only managed to confirm that One of my keyfiles tdoes exists on the drives and spans two complete stripes. It seems to me that the stripe might be missing data in places, in which case I'll need to compute the missing data using XOR.

I'm stuck on automating this whole mess.

Any suggestions?

Oh, man. A year? :-S

http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/.../recovery_raid

It's in the attachments to the article. If you need some help, let me know, ok?

eantoranz at gmail

Thanks so much for the link. You did EXACTLY what I am trying to do, only with a little more vigor! I'll give your program a shot. I'll have to spend more time on getting the ordering right, and weeding out the two RAID5 sets (I think it was 4 drives were part of one array and 7 drives wer part of the other with a hot spare). I too am missing a drive, so that'll make it even more challenging. But, I do have a rosetta file to work with. I'll let you know how your software works.

Thanks again!

The program can take care of the missing disk, so no worries on that side. You just need to provide the right ordering of the disks, the right strip size and the right algorithm.

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