RAID 10 Recovery Procedures | Questions

[commissarmo]

I had 2 RAID 10s on hardware controllers (1 with the OS failed for unknown reason, and I broke the other by I believe pulling two of the drives, though its been a long time I've just had them sitting there and dont specifically remember the failure cause).

Using RAID Recovery for Windows (superb software), I was able to pick 2 of the 4 RAID 10 drives for the OS and have managed to pull the raw data off it (in the past ive been able to reimage it and even boot when this happened!).

So I'm wondering what is safer for the other RAID 10, which is not a boot volume:

1. Should I attempt to boot the machine with the hardware controller attached and see if the RAID 10 is readable?

Specifically, what are the rules regarding applying power to a RAID card?

2. If I disconnected the RAID 10 drives just like the first array and attempted non-writable recovery, but applied power obviously to the drives, would this preclude me being able to try to just load the array again?

i.e. can I take out the drives, try to recover, and if it doesn't work, put them back on the controller and load them through the newly restored OS?

Thanks in advance to posters.

 

[commissarmo]

I guess this is a bit esoteric... but in either case I highly recommend Runtime Software's products for RAID recovery. I was able to recover both of my RAID 10 arrays (BOTH of which had had controller failures of some sort) using RAID Recovery for Windows, and RAID Reconstructor. I haven't been able to create a bootable copy of my RAID 10 OS volume yet, but I also think there is some free software out there that I used to do that successfully once. I'd love to be able to create a VHD or VHDK file and boot the image in a virtual machine, but I've also had a lot of trouble getting that to work for some reason.

I think I'm done with RAID at this point given how much overhead it is to manage with so many issues.