Rebuilding RAID O for recovery purposes

[dragonvet]

Hello,

I own a AMS T5c Venus 5 bay RAID enclosure. It uses a JMicron JM393 chip for hardware RAID control and for port multiplying, it includes support for USB 3.0 or ESata to connect to your pc. It's a pretty zippy little enclosure and is solid and well build, all aluminum. The JMicron controller handles all the regular RAID modes and does a great job IME but I've only run it in RAID 5 and most recently 0. When I had drives fail in RAID 5 and hot swapped them, I was back to accessing files as normal in a very short time, so the thing does what it's supposed to and seems to work.

All that aside, it has a proprietary 120watt psu which seems to have a high failure rate, mine failed.

Right now I can't afford to replace it and don't even know if I want to. HOWEVER, it failed with x4 2 TB hard drives in it setup in raid 0. So I have about 4 or 5 TB worth of data to recover.

Several questions... obviously I want to get my data back... I have tried Partition Guru Pro, ReclaiME and ZAR but since I don't have my exact parameters, I've not been able to rebuild the RAID in software.

So the questions are simple...

What is a good/great RAID recovery software to rebuild a raid in software or from iso?

Is there any JMicron specific application available? They are relatively large, even some ASUS boards use them?

Last, since the disks have been moved, I lost the order.... what is a good fool proof way to manually detect the order of the 4 disks in the RAID? What about the other parameters?

The disks are physically fine, I just can't use my hardware raid enclosure because the power supply is kaput.

Thanks

 

[Starcruiser]

RAID is VERY picky. If you don't use the same controller type, there's no guarantee it can be read at all. Going from hardware to software RAID I've never seen work from experience.
If you put the drives into another enclosure that uses the same RAID controller, that's your best bet at recovery.

 

[S Haran]

You tried ReclaiMe? What were the results? It does a scan and attempts to find the RAID config.

The RAID config can also be seen from the RAID meta data. Try http://www.osforensics.com/rebuild-raid.html

Or you should be able to see the meta data if you connect the drives to Linux and run "mdadm --examine /dev/XXX" where XXX is a RAID member drive.

If you have the correct config recovery with software RAID recovery tools is often possible. I do a lot of remote NAS/RAID recovery work "the Linux way". If you get stuck I am happy to take a look.

 

[dragonvet]

You tried ReclaiMe? What were the results? It does a scan and attempts to find the RAID config.

The RAID config can also be seen from the RAID meta data. Try http://www.osforensics.com/rebuild-raid.html

Or you should be able to see the meta data if you connect the drives to Linux and run "mdadm --examine /dev/XXX" where XXX is a RAID member drive.

If you have the correct config recovery with software RAID recovery tools is often possible. I do a lot of remote NAS/RAID recovery work "the Linux way". If you get stuck I am happy to take a look.

To date I have still not been able to recover this RAID, but to be fair I gave up in mid June due to a move. Now that I am settled in my new place I am about to reattempt it. ReclaiMe as well as several tools I have on a hadron usb stick have not been successful simply because I do not have the correct parameters for the raid nor the original disk order and none of those programs have been able to determine them successfully. Disk order though tedious isn't impossible to determine with only 4 drives (theoretically). But after trying every possible combination I was still not successful in recreating a complete raid. I can see some of the data, but not in a complete form.

StellarPhoenix has been the most promising so far, but because I haven't had the start sector, sector size etc it's not been a complete success.

Fast forward to today, and I am actually expecting a package today from Amazon of a Syba 5 port multiplier with hardware JMB393 controlled RAID SY-PCI40037. From what I can surmise the card is for all intents and purposes IDENTICAL in function to my enclosure and using the same chipset the JMB393. I am holding out hope that this will be the magic ($60) bullet I have been waiting for.

I do have a Linux box that I use for configuring my bitcoin miners but I don't know if that motherboard will support port multiplying, however I guess I could easily just make a live boot USB stick using RedHat or Ubuntu or something. That is a great tip I should have thought of. I am not at all versed on reading meta data but I am going to try the resources you gave me and see what my results are.

I am really hoping that I can just connect the drives to my new RAID card, set it to RAID 0, then swap the order until it is right. Fingers crossed.... I may be asking you a few questions S Haran )) Thanks again for your answer, it probably set me on a good path.

 

[dragonvet]

Well my sata port multiplier with JMB393 chipset arrived yesterday. It is a basic 5 port SATAII multiplier with a 5/12v power connector. It connects to the MB via a sata cable essentially turning 1 port into 5. The model is SY-PCI40037 and I paid about $60 for it on Amazon. It features the exact same JMicron chip that my external Venus T5c enclosure used and is configured via dip switches.

So I plugged her into my ASUS P7H57D mobo I am planning to use for my home NAS. I connected all the drives, set the dip switches to RAID 0 and fired up the computer.

It's currently running Windows 7 and seemed to take longer than normal to boot up, but when it was finished and at the desktop there was a message bubble on the sys tray that said "Your drive is now ready for use"... I thought "No Fing way!"... but after going into explorer and clicking computer, sure enough there it was! Drive D: all 8TB of it! I opened it up and there was all my files... just like that. I didn't even have to get the disk order correct, the chipset knew the correct order and everything was configured automatically and I had my RAID 0 back with NO DATA LOSS in less than 15 minutes total. WOW~ That turned out to be REMARKABLY easy!

 

[Ricky Rocker]

Well my sata port multiplier with JMB393 chipset arrived yesterday. It is a basic 5 port SATAII multiplier with a 5/12v power connector. It connects to the MB via a sata cable essentially turning 1 port into 5. The model is SY-PCI40037 and I paid about $60 for it on Amazon. It features the exact same JMicron chip that my external Venus T5c enclosure used and is configured via dip switches.

So I plugged her into my ASUS P7H57D mobo I am planning to use for my home NAS. I connected all the drives, set the dip switches to RAID 0 and fired up the computer.

It's currently running Windows 7 and seemed to take longer than normal to boot up, but when it was finished and at the desktop there was a message bubble on the sys tray that said "Your drive is now ready for use"... I thought "No Fing way!"... but after going into explorer and clicking computer, sure enough there it was! Drive D: all 8TB of it! I opened it up and there was all my files... just like that. I didn't even have to get the disk order correct, the chipset knew the correct order and everything was configured automatically and I had my RAID 0 back with NO DATA LOSS in less than 15 minutes total. WOW~ That turned out to be REMARKABLY easy!

Hi there @dragonvet I'm not sure whether this will reach you but I'm in trouble with my missus as have lost my family photographs on a RAID 1+0 configured with this JMB393 chipset ....and it is now end of life so I can't find it to purchase anywhere. If you do happen to see this and you maybe would be willing to sell - or even rent it if you want it back - to me so I can try and recover my photos, I would massively appreciate it! My email address is<PII removed by Moderator> - thanks!

 

[USAFRet]

Hi there @dragonvet I'm not sure whether this will reach you but I'm in trouble with my missus as have lost my family photographs on a RAID 1+0 configured with this JMB393 chipset ....and it is now end of life so I can't find it to purchase anywhere. If you do happen to see this and you maybe would be willing to sell - or even rent it if you want it back - to me so I can try and recover my photos, I would massively appreciate it! My email address is<PII removed by Moderator> - thanks!

Please start a NEW thread for your particular situation.
This one is 6 years old.