Encrypted Raid 5 Array Recovery

C

Charles W. Stumpfel

n00b
Joined
Sep 11, 2007
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The setup is:

3x500gb WD HDD in Raid5
Intel Ich9r controller(fakeraid)
2x74gb Raptors in raid0

Here is what happened: I bought a 4th 500gb hdd to add to the array. I installed it into the case, closed back up and turned her on. Monitor was still blank after 30 sec so i hit the reset button, blank screen again so i did a hard-off. Opened the case up saw that the videocard power cable had been unseated; seated it back in and restarted. Booted just fine till i got to the Intel Raid bios startup. The 3 Raid 5 drives now showed as "Offline Members"............uh-oh. In windows intel matrix manager the raid5 isn't even there, just shows my healthy raid0 and 3 'Offline'member Disks".

No idea what happened inbetween those hard-offs but im guessing the intel fakeraid flagged 2 of the drives as degraded and failed the array. The big BUT is the entire 1TB partition is encrypted SO there is no way (that i know of) that some data could have been half-written on the drives since the encrypted partition was not even mounted. So from what i can tell i'm left with 3 healthy drives with all data intact and a paranoid intel driver that wants me to restart the array from scratch.

Possible solutions:
1)Install Ubuntu and try to mount the raid5 with dmraid or something since it doesn't use the intel driver(i hope)
2)Try out one of the data recover programs that can do a virtual mount of failed raid5 arrays. My concern with this is truecrypt has scrambled my drive and its my understanding these programs work by scanning the bits of the HDDs for complete files; it would only see garbage when trying to read an encrypted/distributed Array.
3) try a new MB; i'd like to save this for last option.
4) find someway to trick the intel driver into thinking i had a 3 drive raid array.

What i really need is something that can virtualy mount the raid5 array so that either i can mount the truecrypt partition or copy all the raw data onto another drive. All three drives are disconnected at the moment. Before i dissconnected them saw that none are visible in windows or any data recover program i was exploring. Most likely since they are flagged as raid drives but with no array to belong too. So to use a recovery program i would need to use the matrix manager to set them as "non-raid disks".

the irony of it all is my 1TB external backup drive arrived the same day as the the array failure<facepalm>.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated
Thanks in advance,
Chuck
 
Im sorry to say but youre probably screwed, due to the encryption. Even if the drives weren't encrypted, using pure software RAID complicates the issue, and makes recovery near impossible.
 
Things got a little better over the weekend, after disconnecting all the drives then experimenting with reconnecting 1 by 1, i got the raid array to reappear and 2 of the drives to show up as "normal" members and the 3rd drive as "offline member". The problem is the array is still failed even though i have 2 outta 3 drives.

So my options are now to
1) delete the raid array in the bios then recreate hoping the ich9r then knows how to read the array.
2) delete the array in the bios so that something like r-studio can read the drives and create a virtual drive.
3) connect the 2 healthy drives to another controller and then try do a virtual mount with r-studio.

as long as i can get something to recognize the original encrypted partition then im set. i can do a byte for byte copy to another drive then mount the encrypted partition from there.

note: im 95% sure all the drives are fine, the intel driver is just going f***ing nuts.

Any advice?
chuck
 
Any raid array with # of drives - 1 should still be able to mount, there just may be a missing setting that would allow it to mount in a degraded state.
 
Did you try replacing the "offline" drive with a different drive so the controller could rebuild the array?
 
Gumbi said:
Did you try replacing the "offline" drive with a different drive so the controller could rebuild the array?
Click to expand...

Ya, i had a 4th identical 500gb drive that i tried to rebuild too. There simply isn't any option in the matrix manager; even marking the extra drive as a "spare" did nothing, it just says "failed" array.

Here's what intel had to say, very encouraging......... Nice to see they admit that intel raid5 is destroyed after a reset or 2. I still refuse to give up.

All the data is there i just need a robust program that can read it. And i tried r-studio, its having problems finding the partition, i still have not deleted the raid array in the bios. To get r-studio to see the drives i connected the healthy 2 to a gigabyte controller and used an "empty space" for the other drive. guess my next step is to delete it from the bios and recreate hoping either the intel controller will recognize the original partition or r-studio can.




Hello Charles,

Thank you for contacting Intel(R) Technical Support.

1. On RAID 5 volumes, parity will always be reinitialized after a "Dirty Shutdown", meaning sudden resets, power outages, etc... When a dirty shut down occurs, parity cannot be guaranteed; hence the need for a complete parity initialization.

2. Please review the information at:

http://support.intel.com/support/chipsets/imsm/sb/cs-021506.htm

3. What happened is that a dirty shutdown occurred while the volume was not in a stable state, meaning at the moment it was being restored. Since it was not in a stable state, parity cannot be re-initialized because one of the hard drives does not contain complete and valid data (drive that was being rebuilt). This means that the volume cannot be recovered unfortunately.

Please contact your computer manufacturer for additional information and troubleshooting assistance

Sincerely,

Allan J.
Intel(R) Technical Support
 
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