RAID5 Drive Recovery

[Bruce Cloutier]

I have a set of RAID5 drives from a failed server. Can I get a new enclosure for them (maybe USB) that would accept the drives, not try to reformat them and give us the data? They're SATA drives... well I think? Just wondering if anyone has experience with that. I don't. They were in Dell hardware c2005.

[Leo Enticknap]

Do you just want to re-use the drives, or recover what is already written on them?

If you want to re-use the drives then potentially yes, but at 16 years old, I would not want to trust them to store anything important. At that age, they might also have the older IDE physical connector rather than the more commonly found SATA. USB to IDE adapters are available, but a SATA drive enclosure would not work if this is what they are. After connecting them to a modern PC, you might want to check out their SMART status using a utility such as CrystalDiskInfo, to see what sort of condition they are in. For example, this one has bad sectors and should ideally be replaced:

dying_HDD.PNG
If you want to recover existing data, that may be more tricky. If the drive is from a RAID set, it will likely be formatted in a filesystem that Windows or Mac OS cannot read natively, e.g. ext2/3, or XFS. There are various ways you can try to get at it, e.g. booting a computer into an Ubuntu Live CD, or buying a Windows plugin to read these filesystems, but you are starting to get into "under the hood" territory at that point.

[Bruce Cloutier]

I want to see if I can recover the data. As you say the drives themselves are old (and small). It also isn't extremely critical. I suspect that I can still get some Dell hardware that we might have later use for with larger new drives but which can work initially with the format of these drives. The server died and with all of the expense to have RAID5 in place to handle the loss of a disk, we cannot handle the loss of the motherboard. I could probably get another motherboard but...

Just curious if any of you guys had encountered a RAID subsystem that might be designed to recover data from a range of formats. I've been impressed with some of the knowledge floating around here.

Sadly, while we are now using separate nice new and shinny NAS boxes, we had not yet completely moved everything from this old guy. It's an old PowerEdge 2900. It was running Windows Server 2003. It is hard to just walk away from data when you know it is just sitting there.

[Leo Enticknap]

Afterthought: the physical connectors on the drives might also be SAS, as distinct from IDE or SATA. Again, you can get adapters.

Do you know if this was a software RAID created by Windows Server 2003, or did the deceased Dell have a hardware RAID controller in it? If the latter, could you take that card out of the server and put it in another computer?

[Carsten Kurz]

+1 what Leo wtote. It should be no problem to mount this RAID on any windows server system (maybe even a workstation version), but it is necessary to know wether the RAID was a software RAID managed by the OS, or a hardware RAID managed by a high-level RAID controller. Did that server have a separate system/boot disk?

https://social.technet.microsoft.com...=winserver8gen

[Marcel Birgelen]

If it was in hardware back from 2005, it was most likely a Dell hardware solution and not a software RAID solution, I also don't remember Windows 2003 supporting RAID5 in software-RAID mode, but I could be wrong.

RAID5 stripes the data across the data disks. So, in practice, if you write a big file, it will end up striped across all the disks except the parity disk. (Well, even that's not entirely true all the time, because some RAID systems also stripe the parity. But that's the reason why you can't simply pop-in your disk as USB and read from there. The data on that disk is garbage, according to the O.S. It can't usually not even find a file system.

In case of a hardware RAID, you should try to look up what controller came with the Dell server. It's probably a PERC, so most newer PERC controllers will probably be able to read from the array.

[Carsten Kurz]

Even NT server already supported software RAID5.

[Bruce Cloutier]

Yeah it was a Dell hardware RAID solution. PERC/6 or something like that. There is a separate card for the RAID but I am not sure that it connects into any standard bus slot.

So this old Dell PowerEdge 2900 just started throwing CPU IERR E1410 errors right from the start after power is applied. It doesn't even attempt the Power On Self-Test. No video. Nothing. You guys don't need to bother trying to debug that. Obviously, this is junk. We've been trying all of the Dell recommendations harvested from the Web and otherwise.

But after all of the discussion about how there had to be RAID when the server was first installed we've never had a drive failure or benefited from the RAID striping. Instead the system in general gave up and the data lost regardless. So its just kind of a challenge to not succumb to this event. It is more about that than the need for anything stored there. A few things are lost but no big deal at this point.

Again, I was just wondering if there were any smart RAID enclosures out there that would accept the drives? I need to hit up Dell with that question.

It drives home the point that there needs to always be some active and aggressive backup strategy in place. This plays into the redundancy requirement too.

[Carsten Kurz]

I wouldn't give up yet.Dell should be able to answer some questions. One reason I usually try to avoid hardware raid solutions is exactly this - the RAID setup/config is often not documented/non-standard, and if a hardware device gives up, you may be lost. If the NAS/RAID uses a standard Linux software base, as often nowadays, your chances are much better. That said, and you know that of course - an operational RAID is not a backup, it's just a safer way to operate with the data.

[Marcel Birgelen]

The Dell PE2900 did have on-board RAID capabilities, but those could be expanded with additional RAID cards, those could also support external storage shelves.

There are professional data-recovery services that support most common RAID configurations, but those are pretty expensive. Maybe you're better off trying to buy a used PE 2900 off of Ebay and put your drives back in there. Alternatively, you could try to get a refurbished mainboard for your 2900 and try it from there.

Even NT server already supported software RAID5.

Apparently, NT 4.0 server supported striped RAID sets with single parity in software. Problem back then would've been the performance of those kind of solutions. Multi-core, multi-threaded CPUs weren't all the rage back in NT times...

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I have several 2900's in going on ten years old in two and three screen theaters, they ruin 24/7/365!. Same basic server as the rack mount 2950 although the 2900 can old more peripheral accessory cards. I have built systems with many different types of Hardware Raid and a few with Software Raid over the last 15 years. Software RAID seems to be the least recoverable type unless it's still in it's original server or frame that is still functioning, GDC's software raid seemed to work the best but it's also proprietary. And it always seems the two RAID systems are not compatible with each other when importing an existing configuration, so know what type, brand and model of RAID the drives were running under and even with Hardware raid you had best have the same manufacturers raid card to be sure to be able to import a given configuration, but it not necessarily be the same exact model of card.. Then importing a raid configuration is pretty easy and the data can be read back. But otherwise you just have to experiment. Hardware RAID also seems to be easiest on the hard drives themselves, while software raid has the drives working harder... probably to stay in sync. When I was done experimenting with all the raid crap I then proceeded to assemble ~40 TMS systems. All were based around Dell 2950 servers using PERC 5 raid controllers... this was back in 2012... After all these years none of the RAID 5 4 drive data drives have ever failed in the Dells, they were all Hitachi 1 TB drives. Only two Raid OS Drives actually had a drive failure and new drives were installed and that drive allowed to rebuild. The rest are still running just fine today, a few were replaced in 2017 with new Dell servers in complexes that added screens and where more CPU power was needed to transfer content around on more screens. Hyperthreading CPU's and extra memory really helps out there! NOte that all TMS were GDC based systems. Just yesterday I was adding new 1 TB drives to me HP Z600 workstation and ran into a problem where the LSI Raid card did not like the new drives. It had the latest firmware installed that covered up to 2 TB drives. But the largest drives I could get to work in it were 500GB. So waiting on a new LSI raid card and cables to arrive.
Also, Be sure to discern which function you are about to select actually imports an existing raid configuration!!!! Some older raid cards are not clear in the wording and or the function to import might be sort of hidden in the card functions.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Newer PERC cards usually can import foreign configurations of older Dell servers. Even some LSI Logic cards will import PERC arrays (LSI Logic is the primary supplier for Dell RAID hardware). The problem is getting your harddrives to fit, as Dell has swapped their drive caddies around over the years. Many modern machines also only support 2.5" disks. Also, backplanes are important: SAS backplanes take both SAS and SATA drives, but SATA backplanes won't take SAS drives.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

Newer PERC cards usually can import foreign configurations of older Dell servers. Even some LSI Logic cards will import PERC arrays (LSI Logic is the primary supplier for Dell RAID hardware). The problem is getting your harddrives to fit, as Dell has swapped their drive caddies around over the years. Many modern machines also only support 2.5" disks. Also, backplanes are important: SAS backplanes take both SAS and SATA drives, but SATA backplanes won't take SAS drives.

They definitely can, I have done it a number of times. A raid on a Perc 5 can be imported into a Perc 7 just as normal.

[Bruce Cloutier]

I have some SATA USB adapters coming so I can access 3 of the drives at the same time from a PC. I also found software claiming to be able to recover RAID5 from all formats including hardware. I will let you know how it goes with more detail if the solution works. There are other software choices to perform the recovery. This was the first. It has a price tag but nothing painful.

Mark, when you posted that photo in another thread I noted the PE2900 sitting there. We were working to shut this one down and just hadn't gotten all the way with that before it decided it needed to retire. We got lucky that there was nothing critical on it at the end. Like I said, I just don't want it to think it had the last word.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

I had already retired a 2900 in central Utah a couple summers ago. THe problem with these older CPU's is they have a hard time keeping up with the updated GDC TMS software. They run slower and slower. the more updates that are done. Not such a big deal where not many films get moved via the TMS though. That uses lots of CPU horsepower. The 2900in the picture is in Winnemucca, NV.. There is still one other 2900 left that's running