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How to Get Files Off a Raid Hard Drive

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So this is kind of a fun one,

I have two SAS drives here that were once on a sever we used in house relating to development of our product. There was a hard drive failure and the end result was that we ended up buying another hard drive to replace the drive they were using that failed.

I am not sure what happened in the interim as its been about 6 months, but now I have both drives that were in the array here on my desk and I have been tasked with getting the data off of the drives. I don't know what RAID configuration they were using but I am almost positive it was RAID 1. I also don't know which of these drives is the bad drive as I was just given them and they had been sitting for some time and nobody is exactly sure.

So do you guys have any suggestions as to what I can do to get data off of these drives? We have another server that we can connect them to but when that happens it wants to initialize the array which is certainly going to wipe the data.

So the TL:DR version of this is as follows:

I have two SAS drives, one is bad I don't know which.

These drives are from a RAID array, and I don't know which type of configuration, but am pretty sure it was RAID 1

I need to find a way to make the data accessible on the good drive, when I tried to plug the drive into an existing server it wanted me to initialize the disk, which as far as I know will wipe the data.

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated.

Thanks,

SoupBurger

Edited Jun 25, 2014 at 17:39 UTC
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6 Replies

DragonsRule
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Jun 25, 2014 at 16:15 UTC

What kind of drives?  SATA?

If it's RAID 1 and they were NTFS it may not be a big deal.  Just use a USB to SATA connector and plug each of them in and see what you get.

SoupBurger
Thanks for the quick response, unfortunately they are SAS drives. Sorry I didn't mention that, I updated my original post. Based on what I have seen what few USB to SAS adapters that exist aren't the most reliable, and I could try daisychaining a USB to SATA with a SATA to SAS adapter but I personally doubt that would work. I may have just not searched thoroughly enough though.

They are on the NTFS file system as well.

DragonsRule
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Jun 25, 2014 at 17:44 UTC

SoupBurger wrote:

and I could try daisychaining a USB to SATA with a SATA to SAS adapter but I personally doubt that would work.
USB was just for ease of use.  I would grab a SATA to SAS adapter and just pop the case off a PC and connect directly.
SoupBurger
Good idea. Thank you for the suggestion.

I am kind of ashamed I didnt think of that myself.

SoupBurger
Well unfortunately we do not have any machines in house, at least that aren't production machines, that have a SAS controller. The problem is that SAS to SATA adapters will not work without a SAS controller.

Further complicating the issue, I can only find one single SAS  NON-RAID controller and it doesn't have the right type of SAS port.

Our spare servers are all from around the same time and have PERC 700 cards, the following link is a walk through for configuring the VDs on my card.

http://community.spiceworks.com/how_to/show/8781-configuring-virtual-disks-on-a-perc-5-6-h700-contro...

So right now, I am leaning towards two things.

1.) trying to see if putting the drives back in the orginal machine, with the original controller, will have the drives recognized and I can access the data from there.

2.) Trying to get an adapter from this site,http://www.cs-electronics.com/New_HD%20MiniSAS_Adapters.html and connecting it to an external SAS connector like shown in the first picture (order #: ADP-4480) 

DragonsRule
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Jun 25, 2014 at 20:30 UTC

If the original machine is available I would definitely try that.

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How to Get Files Off a Raid Hard Drive

Source: https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/526313-getting-data-off-of-old-drives-from-raid-array