Question How to read old Intel RAID 1 drives

[AardvarkCheeselog]

I have 2 drives taken from an old system that died without backups. The system had an Intel ICH10R Southbridge controller with 2 drives in a RAID 1 (disk mirroring) config.

What is the most plausible way to get the data read from these drives?

 

[Aeacus]

What is the most plausible way to get the data read from these drives?

Should be as simple as cloning one of the drive's contents to another drive and then accessing the data/image.

Working with clones is better since then, you don't damage the original drive any further.

For other methods, found this: https://community.spiceworks.com/t/how-to-recover-data-from-a-broken-raid-1-set/775069/7

 

[johnbl]

sometimes you have to have the same hardware controller to read the data from the drive. ICH10R was sometime in 2008 or 2009
you would want to know what machine the drives came out of and what controller chip it was using (intel? some systems had more than one)

 

[evermorex76]

With that type of RAID controller, you can actually probably just plug one of the drives into another computer with the port set to AHCI (non-RAID) mode and it will just be readable, similar to using Windows software RAID 1. Intel didn't use any proprietary encoding/structure like some other add-in hybrid (fakeRAID) controllers.

 

[AardvarkCheeselog]

With that type of RAID controller, you can actually probably just plug one of the drives into another computer with the port set to AHCI (non-RAID) mode and it will just be readable, similar to using Windows software RAID 1. Intel didn't use any proprietary encoding/structure like some other add-in hybrid (fakeRAID) controllers.

This is what I was hoping to hear.

"AHCI mode" is plain-vanilla modern non-IDE SATA, right?

 

[fzabkar]

This is what I was hoping to hear.

"AHCI mode" is plain-vanilla modern non-IDE SATA, right?

I think any SATA mode should work, unless the RAID metadata are located at the beginning of the drive.

If the drive doesn't mount, you could view the data in DMDE:

https://dmde.com/

If there is a partition offset, there are ways to extract your data using the free version.

 

[Aeacus]

"AHCI mode" is plain-vanilla modern non-IDE SATA, right?

Yes.

Though, there is no such thing as IDE SATA mode. Either it is SATA or PATA (aka IDE). SATA and PATA aren't compatible with each other (different connector for one). But there are crossover adapters out there.

 

[fzabkar]

Yes.

Though, there is no such thing as IDE SATA mode. Either it is SATA or PATA (aka IDE). SATA and PATA aren't compatible with each other (different connector for one). But there are crossover adapters out there.

A SATA controller can be configured for IDE/legacy/compatibility mode. This will make it appear like a PATA controller to the OS. I'm running my old box in this mode right now.