Partition Types in a Soft Spanned Set

  Last time I explained the basic premise of a spanned set.  I used the example of a clients RAID that contained 3 36 GB SCSI drives. In a standard set each one of the drives would use one partiton for the entire drive and then the set would be mounted... 

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When good RAIDs Go Bad, A Technicians Worst Nightmare

The next machine with a bad hard drive was my server. This server has been running as a server in our home for about 8 years. HAH! Now that is not to say that we haven’t done upgrades, because we have. We have always kept the “data” area of the... 

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Recovering a Spanned RAID Set Without RAID Software

  Recently it was my displeasure to work on a three drive spanned set for NT 4.0.  The set was soft configured so when the boot drive went down, with all of the configuration data for the RAID on it, the RAID would not mount.  In addition to that,... 

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Use Bad Block Frequency to determine RAID 5 stale drive

We have been discussing the love affair I have with stale drives in a RAID five array and how best to determine if in fact one exists. I explained how the NTFS file system data is normally laid out and the fact the old and new data, as well as how... 

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Determining a Stale Hard Drive in Most RAIDs

  In my last installment I covered two of the three reasons why we do a parity check.  First we want to make sure that we do not have a stale hard drive in the array.  Although I did not cover how one determines if in fact a stale hard drive exists,... 

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Analyzing RAID parity

Last time I discussed how to find the RAID data offset for a SNAP OS 4.x RAID handler. To put it briefly it was just a simple matter of finding Cylinder Group zero on the first drive in the array and back tracking 48 sectors. Once the RAID data offset... 

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Check Your RAID Consistency Before A Rebuild

Over the years one of the most consistent problems with RAID recovery is the rebuild. I would estimate that nearly 40 percent of the RAIDs that we cannot recover are due exclusively to the fact that a technician executed a rebuild before verifying the... 

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RAID Configuration and Parity Check

The function set for the inaugural offering of RAID Diagnostic Toolkit is very basic. This post will explain how to choose a set of ’streams’ to build a ‘RAID set’. Initially the software does not have any options for stripe size,... 

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RAID Five Steps to recovering your data

     In one of my articles I tried to define the mathematics of a RAID 5 stripe and how it relates to data recovery.  Using the eXclusive ORing truth table we can continue to run the array even when one drive has dropped out of the array.  This... 

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RAID Data Recovery Overview

We have been getting a lot of calls about RAID data recovery lately. As more and more computer manufacturers utilize RAID systems in home computers, RAID failures rise exponentially. It used to be that RAID data recovery calls that we received were large... 

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