Windows XP SATA RAID recovery with Knoppix 4.0.2
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
Re: Windows XP SATA RAID recovery with Knoppix 4.0.2
Quote:
Originally Posted by tmcphail
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).
You might try buildind a Bart's PE disk
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.
