RAID 5 reassembly

[MrAl]

Hi I wanted to ask is it possible to reassemble raid 5. I had raid 5 , one hdd died and I wanted to make more space so I did a backup, inserted new hdds, created new raid 10 and now I have a problem with backup. Is it possible somehow to go back to raid 5 ? Please help this is urgent.! Any advice is appreciated.

[Networks]

Can you tell me the make and model and size of drives you had in the RAID5 originally and each step you took don't leave anything out also the type of raid controller make model

[MrAl]

motherboard : MSI 945 GT Speedster (RAID 5 was configured)
controller : Intel ICH7R SATA RAID
Old hdd : 3x Fujitsu MWV2200 BT (3x 200GB)
1x Fujitsu MHZ2400 BT G2 (400GB - because of a failure of a one hdd long time ago)
Process : Turn off pc, replace hdds with the new ones, boot again, enter BIOS RAID configurator, no raid was detected, I selected new hdd, I created new raid 5, but the size was bad (it listed just 47.9 GB of a potential size and new hdd are wd black 750 BG each). Then I deleted that raid 5 and created raid 10 , size is OK shown and I proceeded with backup restore.

[Networks]

So you have all the original drives the 2 Fujitsu 200GB and the 1 Fujitsu 400GB drives that have not been changed correct ? Do you know which drive was 0 1 2 did you mark them in any way. If the above 2 statements are true the best tool to re-assemble the raid is R-Studio you can add each drive in the correct order and recover the data from them. As you connect the drives to the system ie not in RAID mode just normal sata and don't let windows write a signature to each drive when it prompts if it does click no.

Normally we would make images of each drive first and work off the image files but you need a 1TB drive to hold the images at a min. R-Studio can create the images do 1 drive at a time.

[MrAl]

Hi thanks you for quick answer. Yes I have all drives and nothing has been on them changed. For 2 of them I know but unfortunately for 2 of them I am not sure. How to read the data from hdds in RStudio , do I need to write a code ?? If so any good website for a tutorials ? Do I need to connect them as SATA or I can connect them as external USB hdds ?
One more thing. This is how to read data from broken RAID via softwer utilities, and do you know if I can connect them back to hardware raid in order to boot from them once again ??

[Networks]

On my mobile r-studio does all the work their website has all info you need to do the job

[Networks]

Yes I have all drives and nothing has been on them changed. For 2 of them I know but unfortunately for 2 of them I am not sure.

Not clear thought you only had 3 drives in a RAID5 setup you can recover from 2 drives if they are ok but you have to tell R-studio you have 3 drives

Do I need to connect them as SATA or I can connect them as external USB hdds ?
SATA ONLY or do the images which is the safest thing in case you make a mistake you still have the original drives to go back to

One more thing. This is how to read data from broken RAID via softwer utilitie
R-Studio will allow you to re-create the raid set to recover the data

do you know if I can connect them back to hardware raid in order to boot from them once again ??

The motherboard sata raid controllers are not forgiving and once the raid setup is gone the drives don't store the info like they do in the SCSI and SAS versions which do store the raid config on the drives so the best answer to this ? is NO.

[Alt-rtt]

If you want to give R-Studio a try, this may be useful: RAID recovery presentation and Finding RAID parameters.

[MrAl]

Hi , thank you very very much for your answers. I didn't have 3 hdd Networks, I had 4 , 3 of them are smaller , one bigger newer one which replaced old, dead hdd.
How to do an image of a hdd ? Any special software needed ??
I will then try this R Studio.
But you said that I need to know specific order of a hdds in order to get the data ? If I don't know the order what then ? Any ideas ?
More or less this is closed topic I just need a little more information
Thanks

[Alt-rtt]

You can use R-Studio to create images of your disks, even before buying the software. The R-Studio's on-line help: Images explains how. The article Finding RAID parameters explains how to find RAID parameters, including disk order. Actually, all RAID parameters (disk order, block order and size, offset) should be known to get the files out of a virtual RAID created in R-Studio. Some of them like block size can be found from the controller's setup.