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Old server using a S1200BTS Intel mobo died and has been sitting in a closet for several years. I replaced the motherboard and found that it was originally configured using an onboard hardware raid controller.

Harddrives are still in their original configuration however the raid controller no longer detects any of the drives as being raid drives.

Is there a way for me to rebuild the array without destroying the drives? There are 3 identical hard drives inside of the chassis but I have no idea what raid level it was using.

I made a clone of of one of the drives and without initializing the drive was able to see that every file on the drive has 3 files with the same name but with each ending in 1, 2, or 3 as if each file had 3 parts. None of the files can be opened.

I don't know where to go from here. I'm being told theres close to 800,000 images that need to be recovered and at the moment they're paperweights.

chicks
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Benjamin Jeffrey
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2 Answers2

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Put all three disks into the Linux machine. Serously. Your RAID is likely using "intel matrix storage manager" (IMSM) on-disk metadata format, which is natively recognized by modern Linux Software RAID out of the box, and it will assemble it as a RAID array. Also if it happens to be a SNIA DDF, it will equally recognize it as well. You'll see some /dev/mdXXX devices — that's it. Also it is able to mount your Windows disks and, say, copy the data.

However, before you'll do this, I strongly advise to have clones (or images) of all three drives, to be sure that if something goes wrong, you have a recovery plan. Yes, that's expensive, but if you aren't ready to pay the expense, why are you so worried about the data?

Nikita Kipriyanov
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That was end of life'd a decade ago dude! fortunately that's not a very clever disk controller, it's just a fairly normal Intel RST so there's only so many configurations it could be; R0 - unlikely, R1 - probably not give the three disks, R10 - can't be done with three disks, R5 - highly advised to move away from but probably quite likely.

I'd say try the R5 config, again fortunately there's no set role for any given disk in an R5 array so setting it to R5 I'd guess has a >50% chance of working.

If that doesn't work you're just going to have to wipe the array, restore from last backup and deal with the missing gap data.

Chopper3
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