Raid Drive recovery
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I have a little G-Raid Studio Thunderbolt 2 6TB external hard drive with two drives mirrored to each other. The chassis seems to have failed and will not spin up the drives. I removed the drives and plugged them in to my laptop individually in both Mac and Windows and it seems to see the drive but not mount them due to an unknown format. I just want to recover the data and move it to real business hardware, any advice?
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Stop messing with the array, and send it out for recovery. A simple RAID1 recovery shouldn't cost you much.
But as @scottalanmiller would say "If it wasn't backed up, it's not worth recovering". . .
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RAID is not designed to be mounted elsewhere in this manner. The RAID itself is a form of drive formatting. So, in theory, if the G-RAID Studio system used a RAID that something else uses, then in theory that thing could mount one of the drives. But likely it is something proprietary.
If it is not proprietary, then you do have a chance, but Windows and Mac certainly can't do it as neither of them have access to standard RAID formats, they are proprietary themselves and devices like this can't use what they have.
Linux is the only potential option. MD RAID is from Linux and a standard RAID format used across all manner of devices. So you could try it there in the hopes that your RAID box was a Linux standard one under the hood. Other than that, maybe some specialty recovery tools.
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G-RAID studio is hardware RAID. That means nothing can read it, it's 100% proprietary. You'll need to drop to forensic recovery means.
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@scottalanmiller said in Raid Drive recovery:
G-RAID studio is hardware RAID. That means nothing can read it, it's 100% proprietary. You'll need to drop to forensic recovery means.
Or buy G-RAID Studio, if it supports importing a foreign RAID (given the RAID info is stored on disk like it should be).
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If they are mirrored, try R-Studio. It's inexpensive and there is a trial you can use.
If you need further help I do data recovery.
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50 cent backplane and/or 50 cent powersupply dies, so does 6TB of data.
@scottalanmiller Is hw RAID not an industry standard? Thinking about it i guess that has always been a problem. In HW RAID recovery you generally need the same raid chip manufacturer or card model if your card dies. Same with Fake RAID on mobos. -
Doesn't matter what HW writes the data... it's NTFS or HFS, Ext?, etc.
No one is writing their own file systems just to do RAID.
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@ccwtech said in Raid Drive recovery:
Doesn't matter what HW writes the data... it's NTFS or HFS, Ext?, etc.
No one is writing their own file systems just to do RAID.
What they mean is that you can't "import" that G-RAID Studio RAID1 into a DELL PERC configuration, or vice versa. Different hardware RAID does RAID configuration differently.
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@momurda said in Raid Drive recovery:
@scottalanmiller Is hw RAID not an industry standard?
Using hardware RAID is a standard in the commodity hardware portion of the industry.
The hardware itself, however, is not a standard except within a single vendor.
Example: Nearly all Adaptec cards can read drives from other Adaptec cards of the same era and firmware updates.
Example 2: Nearly all LSI cards can read drives from other LSI cards of teh same era and firmware updates.
Example 3: No Adaptec card can read a drive formatted under LSI or vice versa.
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@momurda said in Raid Drive recovery:
Thinking about it i guess that has always been a problem.
More than you might think. LSI doesn't even do RAID 10, it only does RAID 100. Adaptec doesn't do RAID 100, only RAID 10.
Adaptec does RAID 1 with 3+ mirrors. LSI does not.
Stuff like that.
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@ccwtech said in Raid Drive recovery:
No one is writing their own file systems just to do RAID.
Not exactly a filesystem, but they nearly all write something akin to a filesystem just to do RAID. The "format on disk" is unique whether it is ZFS, MD RAID, LSI, Adaptec, etc. They all look different when you look at the disk itself.
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@scottalanmiller Not from a data recovery standpoint in a RAID 1. Other RAID's yes, but not RAID 1
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I called G-RAID, and you guys are dead on. The new devices have a different hardware RAID controller, so I would have to find an old enclosure on ebay, or pay out for data recovery. I was lucky enough to find a copy of the 1 important piece of development that wasn't super out of date, so I have given up on the drive and the data. I will just move on from here. Thanks for the advice and lesson learned.
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Have you downloaded R-Studio?
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Yes, the - is important!
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@ccwtech said in Raid Drive recovery:
@scottalanmiller Not from a data recovery standpoint in a RAID 1. Other RAID's yes, but not RAID 1
Even RAID 1 generally have some formatting on the disk so that the system knows what is there. It's minor and tools can often recovery easily as the filesystems are not obfuscated. But it's still there.
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For recovery it doesn't matter. A tool like R-Studio can read it very easily.
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@ccwtech said in Raid Drive recovery:
Have you downloaded R-Studio?
I was going to before I found a backup of the Website I needed to restore. I ended up spending my limited time bring the old code up to date instead of testing the software. Thanks for suggestion.
