Windows XP SATA RAID recovery with Knoppix 4.0.2

[tmcphail]

Greetings,

I have a Sony VGC-RA842G with 945P chipset (82801 GR SATA RAID controller) and 4 x 250GB HDs. Windows BSODed and I need to recover the files off the drive. When I boot under Knoppix 4.0.2 /etc/fstab lists the 4 drives as '/dev/sd[abcd] auto noauto, users, exec 0 0'. It also mounts them on the desktop as 4 separate drives 'Hard Disk [sda/b/c/d]'. mdadm -E /dev/sda gives the error 'No super block found on /dev/sda (Expected magic blah blah blah)'.

I'm a relative newbie to Knoppix so I'm guessing from what I observe the controller and/or drives are recognizable by Knoppix; however, shouldn't Knoppix have assembled the raid and mounted it automatically or do I need to do it manually? The drives were configured for RAID5 and had 3 partitions.

Thanks in advance for any help.

tim

[Harry Kuhman]

The drives were configured for RAID5 and had 3 partitions.

Thanks in advance for any help.

You have a major problem. The RAID system you are running apparently isn't a 100% hardware RAID solution but rather depends on special software drivers written for Windows to do some or all of the RAID magic. So with these drivers Windows sees the drives as one big RAID array, but without them Linux sees the original parts, with scattered parts of files systems but no complete data.

Unless the RAID maker also offers drivers for Linux that also format the RAID array in the exact same way that it does when running their Windows RAID drivers, I know of no way that you are going to be able to recover the data with Linux. Even then you have a problem since you would need to do a hard disk install of a Linux system to install the drivers, and that may muck up your current drive configuration.

There is a certain irony here that seems worth mentioning (maybe not for you but to help others). RAID users tend to think that since they have a nice RAID array and are using some of the disk space that they paid for for redundancy that they no longer need to make regular backups. But the ugly truth is if they are running Windoes they may need to make backups more than ever: Windows itself is still highly vulnerable to viruses and trojans and the like that can wipe out all of the data on a RAID array. And of course, as you have just experienced, Windows users frequently experience sudden cases of the entire OS no longer being able to boot, and a RAID soluton that locks that data away from a recovery system like Knoppix presents a problem at this point. And, of course, you can still have hardware problems that destroy the data (I have a friend who lost a case fan and that caused all of his RAID drives to over heat and crash).

[tmcphail]

Additionally: if I do a 'fdisk -l' I get

/dev/sda1 hpfs/ntfs
/dev/sda2 sfs
/dev/sda3 sfs

(stuff omitted from list) Which reflects my 3 partitions and the sizes are what I expect.

[Harry Kuhman]

Additionally: if I do a 'fdisk -l' I get

/dev/sda1 hpfs/ntfs ......

Which tells us that there will be no Linux solution, since a Linux RAID driver would never be able to safely write to a NTFS partition.

[tmcphail]

Not looking to write to the partitions I just want to read from them to a USB/Firewire/Network device to recover some data.

[Harry Kuhman]

Not looking to write to the partitions I just want to read from them to a USB/Firewire/Network device to recover some data.

Oh, I understand that. It's just that since the RAID system seems to need special software drivers it isn't a true hadware RAID solution (which should also look like one big drivce to Linux). I think you need to be focusing on how to get Windows working again without harming the RAID system. Trying to get some support from the RAID maker wouldn't be a bad idea either.

[rcook]

Bart's PE builds a windows boot disk with tools of your choice. There are plugins for ERD & Disk Commander by Winternals.
The ERD or Disk Commander cost money, but what are your data and time worth?
There are several programs available to recover NtFS raid partitions, I don't know if there are any which are freeware.
Some of the commercial programs have a free trial.
They will run against the drive and show you what is recoverable.
You then log on, purchase the software and get a password activate the save function.
Bart's PE is a bootable XP system that runs from CD in ram.
This allows you to run programs against the hard drives of a non booting system.
You will have to search to find what programs are available and which ones you can find or build a plug in for.

I just went through this recovering files (digital photos) from a notebook that I destroyed the front of an NT partion by
a late night thumble. I didn't have to deal with raid. I did end up purchasing software, because the freeware wouldn't
address the problem as I needed it done. I wished to recover directories and filenames, not just a laundry list of
image files on the drive.

[oldmcdonnell]

I have a simular problem in that I have a system at RAID 0 but when booting knoppix from CD it does not detect the any HD (other than my usb storage etc.). When using windows recovery I have to specify the drivers for the raid " FastTrak 376/378 Driver Diskette". When looking at their website there is no driver for linux (link http://members.driverguide.com/drive...riverid=487511)
I suppose this means that Knoppix cannot access the disks and that there is no way to gain access to the data...

[oldmcdonnell]

sorry that link is broken... It's the Promise FastTrack SATA Contoler 376/378 used for 2 seagate 80 GB 7200RPM PATA system drives, RAID 0 striping 2 devices...
If I cannot access these drives then I cannot back up my work... I also cannot amend the simple problem of replacing windows/system32/hal.dll (missing or corrupt) I cannot replace this from the recovery console because "Access is Denied" but there is no admin password. I was advised by tech support to use knoppix as a work around...

[johnsfine]

Is anyone making any progress on this issue?

I am new to Knoppix and to Linux, (so I don't know the right places to look nor what possible work arounds might exist).

I have a Promise SATA RAID controler, similar to the ones discussed earlier in this thread and get the same useless results trying to read it with Knoppix.

It isn't messed up at the moment, and anyway is readable from Ultimate Boot CD for Windows, so I probably won't need to use Knoppix for repair. But I would prefer to have the flexibility of a second set of repair tools.

I assume there is some way to load a driver from a USB memory stick while booting Knoppix, so I shouldn't need to remaster the boot DVD. But I don't know nearly enough about Knoppix to actually know how to load a driver that way. I also don't know enough about Linux to know where to look for such a driver.

Using Knoppix 5.1.1 DVD-2007-01-04-EN