Raid 5 recovery

[skoelle]

Hi all,

I have a raid 5 with 5 disks (3 TB each). That was running on a sil 3132 controller and was created with RAID5MANAGER. All of a sudden the 5th drive was shown as orphan and the raid could not be started.

Hence I physically detached the disks from the raid controller and attached it to a normal sata controller. Now I am able to see the discs but still no software seem to be able to recover the raid.
I already tried ReclaiMe Free RAID Recovery as well as Runtime RAID Reconstructor.

Not sure if it makes a big difference but the entire raid (12 TB) is encrypted with Truecrypt.

I would be glad if someone could help me with ideas to further analyze/fix the situation.

 

[JaredDM]

That is a very sticky situation indeed. There's little to no chance any sort of automated RAID analysis will do anything at all with encrypted data. Even with a data recovery engineer working on it, it's flying totally blind. The good news is with only 5 disks there's just 120 possible combinations of drive order. But, I don't think you're going to find someone willing to do this for free. It'll probably take three or four days to figure it out even by a data recovery engineer like me.

 

[skoelle]

Hi JaredDM, thanks for the feedback. The drive order obviously is known to me. Same as the lock size with is 8 KB. What I don't know is the parity Rotation (not shown in SATARAID5MANAGER). The start sector I as well can only guess.

The encryption obviously is not on the raid settings but only on the data.

If I was able to find out the correct details, I could just restore it to a backup disk, right?
Can anyone tell me the usual start secors that SATARAID5MANAGER puts?

 

[JaredDM]

I wouldn't suspect there'd be any offset value with that controller. I think it stores the RAID information near the end of each drive, so it should be right at the beginning. If you look at sector 0 of the first disk in the rotation you should see the word Truecrypt in the ACII column.