How to tell which RAID I have - File Recovery

[godlysoup]

Hi,

I have a D-Link DNS 323 Dual Hard Drive Network Enclosure that is failing on me. I've pulled both drives out and both are giving me Reallocation count errors. Right now, I'm doing a superscan with Active@ in order to try to get my pictures off, but I've been running into a lot of software online that seems to be more along the lines of RAID recovery. The problem is, I don't know which RAID format (0,1,5) I had it set up as. Is there a way to identify which specific type of RAID format one hard drive is? Or if both were plugged in?

Also, if it helps, they're formatted in ext2fs format. Perhaps there's a Linux software that would be of better use as well?

Cheers

 

[popatim]

with only 2 drives it couldn't be raid 5.

- If you saw the Dlink having twice the space as just one of those drives then it was in raid0 or JBoD mode.
- If you saw it having the same space as just one of the drives then it was likely in raid1
- If you saw two or more drives then it was possibly in individual mode.


You set it up right, do you recall selecting Safety, Performance, Combined, or Individual modes?


The Dlink uses a linux file system and as such cannot be natively read by windows.

**Do Not let windows or any application write to, prep, or format the drives**

 

[popatim]

How to proceed depends on which mode they were in.

Run raid probe or raid reconstructor and see what settings it comes up with. You cant recover anything with the free version but at least we'll know what mode you were in.

After we learn the type, recovering is rather straight forward using a lunux distro boot disk.

 

[fzabkar]

Linux has a free software RAID tool (mdadm) that you could use to assemble your RAID, once you know the drive order, stripe size, RAID type, etc.

I would examine sector 0 of both drives using a disc editor (eg DMDE freeware for Windows). If you could upload this information, then that will immediately tell us the drive order and RAID type.

 

[S Haran]

If you were to run mdadm with the --examine option against your RAID partitions it will display the RAID level, chunk/stripe size, drive order etc

 

[popatim]

Good tip, thanks S Haran!