jay608Going Nucking Futs join:2007-01-22 Homewood, IL (Software) pfSense Netgear CM1000 Zoom 5341J
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jay608
Member
2014-Jan-16 10:28 am
Raid RecoveryLong story short, I had a total raid failure the other day (card failed), but there is some vital information that was on that raid, and the backup is 2 weeks old. Does anyone know of any software that I can use to recover the files. Drives are still good, none of those failed. |
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Jason24 join:2004-01-21 Davenport, FL |
Jason24
Member
2014-Jan-16 10:35 am
What is the RAID card and what level RAID was in use? |
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jay608Going Nucking Futs join:2007-01-22 Homewood, IL |
jay608
Member
2014-Jan-16 10:41 am
Was an LSI 8708, in a raid 10 |
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donoreo Premium Member join:2002-05-30 North York, ON
1 recommendation |
to jay608
In theory you should be able to get another of the same card and recover. |
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Jason24 join:2004-01-21 Davenport, FL |
to jay608
If you can't get a replacement controller, I had good luck with Disk Internals Raid Recovery Software a while back. I have never tried to use it for RAID 10 though, but if you know the physical disk layout you should be able to assemble one of your RAID 0 sets. |
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ke4pym Premium Member join:2004-07-24 Charlotte, NC |
to jay608
As donoreo noted, getting an exact replacement should get you set up (unless it wiped out the drives in its death throws - seen it happen).
RAID configuration information is stored on the controller and the disk array. |
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jay608Going Nucking Futs join:2007-01-22 Homewood, IL |
to Jason24
Thanks I'll give it a try. |
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jay608 |
to ke4pym
What I am scared of is that the config is gone totally. I really don't want to slap these into another controller until I can get the data off. And if I can't well that's another bridge I will have to cross. |
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to jay608
I have never tried with an LSI 8708........ I will say that again, I have never tried with an LSI 8708.....
But, as long as the array creation is manual, and not automatic, you should be able to just plug the drives into a new card of the same make/model, in the same disk order, and have the array recognized as it was before. The array information is stored on the disks. The covet there is that the array creation has to be manual. Some controllers do an automatic configuration, and if it doesn't properly read the existing array info off the disks, it could try creating a new array for you. You don't want that.
If it were me, and if the data was really that important, I would get 2 new cards and some spare disks. Setup a new array with the spare disks, save some data to it, then see what happens when you plug the drives into the 2nd card. |
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donoreo Premium Member join:2002-05-30 North York, ON |
to ke4pym
said by ke4pym:As donoreo noted, getting an exact replacement should get you set up (unless it wiped out the drives in its death throws - seen it happen).
RAID configuration information is stored on the controller and the disk array. I have seen it happen too. Then you see men cry. Of course you have a backup, right? I mean RAID is not a substitute for an external backup. |
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jay608Going Nucking Futs join:2007-01-22 Homewood, IL |
jay608
Member
2014-Jan-16 11:05 am
Yeah I have a backup, but the backup is 2 weeks old, and the guy that 'controls' the back is in China for 2 weeks. So I can't even get it restored. |
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donoreo Premium Member join:2002-05-30 North York, ON |
to jay608
Well once you recover, you have a case for updating the back up procedures Something good can come out of this. |
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jay608Going Nucking Futs join:2007-01-22 Homewood, IL |
jay608
Member
2014-Jan-16 11:08 am
So true, but that doesn't help the cause right now. They aren't going to want to pony up the cost for the Disk Internals lol |
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dennismurphyPut me on hold? I'll put YOU on hold Premium Member join:2002-11-19 Parsippany, NJ
1 recommendation |
said by jay608:So true, but that doesn't help the cause right now. They aren't going to want to pony up the cost for the Disk Internals lol Then the data must not be important. What I'd do is make a dd copy of the drives to an identical pair, and then install the 'clone' drives to a new RAID card. That way, the original is preserved 'just in case'. |
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jay608Going Nucking Futs join:2007-01-22 Homewood, IL |
jay608
Member
2014-Jan-16 11:36 am
It never important to higher ups, because its not their data |
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dennismurphyPut me on hold? I'll put YOU on hold Premium Member join:2002-11-19 Parsippany, NJ |
to jay608
If you don't trust yourself with dd, try OSFClone. » www.osforensics.com/tool ··· ges.htmlVery simple way to make a complete clone of the disk. Again, step 1 - get 2 more of the identical disk models Step 2 - use OSFClone to make a copy of the originals Step 3 - get a new LSI raid card Step 4 - attach the clone disks to the new LSI raid card Step 5 - data should come back. |
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jay608Going Nucking Futs join:2007-01-22 Homewood, IL |
jay608
Member
2014-Jan-16 11:38 am
Thanks for the link Dennis, much appreciated. |
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dennismurphyPut me on hold? I'll put YOU on hold Premium Member join:2002-11-19 Parsippany, NJ |
to jay608
said by jay608:It never important to higher ups, because its not their data Diasgree. That's a failure of management to understand their business. They get paid the big money to understand their business at a higher level. If the data is really, truly important to the business (i.e. will cost them money!) then it's worth recovering. If it is not, then it isn't. That's a pretty simple value calculation to make... If it takes someone you pay $10/hr 20 hours to recreate the data, that's a cost of $200. If the cost to recover the data is $10,000 that's a poor value. If the data contains $2,000,000 of outstanding account receivables, and it costs $10,000 to recover, then it's well worth doing. |
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jay608Going Nucking Futs join:2007-01-22 Homewood, IL (Software) pfSense Netgear CM1000 Zoom 5341J
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jay608
Member
2014-Jan-16 11:47 am
The situation is hard to explain. They aren't our servers, but we host them in our datacenter. We patch them, and keep them functional. But when something like this happens its actually out of our hands because its not our hardware. We have to help them out. |
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dennismurphyPut me on hold? I'll put YOU on hold Premium Member join:2002-11-19 Parsippany, NJ |
said by jay608:The situation is hard to explain. They aren't our servers, but we host them in our datacenter. We patch them, and keep them functional. But when something like this happens its actually out of our hands because its not our hardware. We have to help them out. That's not complicated, it's called managed colocation. Best of luck with the recovery -- how big are the drives if you don't mind me asking? |
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jay608Going Nucking Futs join:2007-01-22 Homewood, IL |
jay608
Member
2014-Jan-16 12:10 pm
If I remember correctly they are 4 x 1TB 7200RPM
Its an educational institution so there's more that comes into play. |
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exocet_cmWriting Premium Member join:2003-03-23 Brooklyn, NY |
to dennismurphy
said by dennismurphy:said by jay608:So true, but that doesn't help the cause right now. They aren't going to want to pony up the cost for the Disk Internals lol What I'd do is make a dd copy of the drives to an identical pair, and then install the 'clone' drives to a new RAID card. Bingo. This is the same procedure we do in our forensics shop when analyzing disks from a RAID array. Write block the originals. Image the originals. Boot the image. |
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jay608Going Nucking Futs join:2007-01-22 Homewood, IL |
jay608
Member
2014-Jan-16 3:31 pm
Well they shelled out for a program call File Scavenger, and it seems to find all of the files. I have my fingers crossed for them. |
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dennismurphyPut me on hold? I'll put YOU on hold Premium Member join:2002-11-19 Parsippany, NJ |
said by jay608:Well they shelled out for a program call File Scavenger, and it seems to find all of the files. I have my fingers crossed for them. How's it going? I would think duping the disks and getting a new RAID controller would be a lot better/easier/quicker/safe than trying to recover data... that isn't a recovery, but just bringing it back online. But I guess some $100 program is cheaper on the surface... |
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jay608Going Nucking Futs join:2007-01-22 Homewood, IL (Software) pfSense Netgear CM1000 Zoom 5341J
2 recommendations |
jay608
Member
2014-Jan-18 11:49 am
They recovered almost everything. They had esxi (free) running on the machine, so everything was in vdmks.
They have/had one issue where they could not get a vm to boot back up because a device wouldn't load. They got it into safe mode and copied all the data off. So as of right now all is quite with that department. The are now moving things to the cloud. |
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dennismurphyPut me on hold? I'll put YOU on hold Premium Member join:2002-11-19 Parsippany, NJ |
Good deal! Glad the important stuff came back. Nothing worse than potentially losing data.
Now that I no longer do IT professionally, I can say that I've been close but never lost data. Worst I ever encountered was a HA clustered system (Sun Cluster 2.2) where a fellow admin intervened during a failover and somehow managed to import the volumes and start Oracle simultaneously on 2 nodes.
That was a cluster-F to undo. I ended up hex-editing the Veritas VxVM private regions on each disk to undo the damage... But somehow I got it right, and we got the customer care database for the entire country (supporting, oh, only about 60 million customers at the time) back online.
Going to tape was going to be a multi-day process for recovery... Glad I avoided that. Someone (not me) would've lost their job if that happened. |
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ke4pym Premium Member join:2004-07-24 Charlotte, NC 1 edit |
to jay608
Remind me to never comment on threads about storage ever again. Had an old DL380 G3 lose its mind this morning. It marked the data RAID 5 array as failed. Drives were looking okay. The controller, for some reason, felt the drives had been removed and reinserted. Told it to re-enable the array and accept "data loss". Something got hosed. SQL server wouldn't fire up. Thankfully the C and D drives were intact. So, I made the executive decision to virtualize the box and restore the E drive from backup. Waiting on the last few gigs to write.. Oh well. One less physical box on the floor now. |
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exocet_cmWriting Premium Member join:2003-03-23 Brooklyn, NY |
What kind of RAID card? I have a P400 from a 380 G5 collecting dust. |
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