David A.Lethe
Guest
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 Posted:
Wed Oct 27, 2004 9:32 am Post subject:
Re: Lost RAID 5 Drive Configuration |
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On 24 Oct 2004 09:34:42 -0700, bmwm7il@yahoo.com (Jaye) wrote:
| Quote: | I have 6 drives (one hot spare) from a RAID 5 config on a DELL
poweredge 4400 with a PERC3 controller. I stupidly removed the
drives, set them aside and when I picked them up to put them in a box,
I forgot what order they were in. Does anyone know how to find out
what order they were in?
Can the drive ID information be read from the drives? Software
perhaps?
Can I simply put them back in the controler and have it recognise them
correctly?
I really need to recover this data and am not sure what to do as there
are no backups.
If I put them back in the wrong order, will it rebuild the Array and
erase my data?
Any help would be great appreciated!
Jaye
I've done data recovery on a variety of engines, but not the PERC3. |
My suggestion is you get the definative answer from Dell (and please
post response back so we can all benefit).
The generic term for what you are asking about is "drive roaming"
capability.
In the event drive roaming is not supported, then chances are good
that not only will your RAID engine not complain, and pass all
consistency checks ... but your data will be toast.
That is because the parity (XOR) information for each stripe will
still be correct, as the ordering of the disks makes no difference to
the RAID engine, unless it specifically tests for this and cares about
it.
Since you only have 6 drives, then you have a relatively small number
of combinations. maybe the perc won't complain if you run through all
the permutations. Alternately, you can write some code to analyze the
data patterns and reconstruct the ordering on the original disks.
David |
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