recovering a broken raid 5

two weeks ago i was faced with a strange problem when i booted the server i would et all the way to windows 2000 server splash and the system would freeze with a dreaded bsod. i called maxtor about this and they informed me after many attempts to fix the problem that i had a corrupt OS and needed to reformat and start again. This poses a problem though i have about three years worth of work on this server and i want to get it off. So i have install windows 2000 server on another comp with enough ide controllers to hold the 4 hard drives and am attmepting to at least get the work off of the harddrives. If i connect all four drives the comp want to boot from the cooked OS and if i try and only hook up a few of them the windows disk maniger tells me i cant mount them. Does anyone have any ideas? I was thinking of using a live cd to boot from then moving the info over to the big usb HD i have but i am not sure if that will even work. any thoughts would be appreciated

Booting from a live cd and copying to another drive will work. However although i have no experience with 2000 server. I would suggest you try to repair it befor you wipe it. It sounds very much like your regestry has been corrupted. Just slap your server 2000 cd in the drive, boot to it and do a repair.

Im guessing no backups eh?

You will probably need to reconstruct the array before you can access your data.

Was this software or hardware RAID?

There are many 3rd party utilities to help you reconstruct.
www.r-studio.com has a few good tools I like to use.

May be quite a challenge tho.

I hope Maxtor support didn't have you perform any functions that might have killed the
integrity of the array..

If you need to send the drives out for recovery, check these guys out.

www.datarr.com/
I have had good luck when them.

Well the one tool I have used in the past for such things can be found at http://trinityhome.org/trk/ a tool true it does use opensource but it worked for me. Needless to say I was able to recove the data rebuild the drive and it works great but it is not running windows as an os now :) Worth a check out before a re-build that will destroy everything. Or generally you can place the drives in another working live hot swap array minus the OS drive and the data should be there.

Are you sure the order of the drives is still the same on the new system?

At least tell us if it was a hardware or software RAID configuration.
If it was a hardware sollution what was/is the brand?
Does the new system have the same brand/type?

Also note that in a RAID 5 configuration 1 drive can die and everything else keeps on working.

Looking at your problem I don't think any of the drives are faulty.
You may have a corrupt filesystem tho.

Is it just me that's fed up of posts which do not hint at security being posted in the wrong place

If it is I'll give up moaning and sulk in a corner.

Steve

Well Steve,

I have great pleasure in disagreeing with a "wezzie" :D (technical joke folks, if you are not from Yorkhire, you won't understand)

Seriously though, the gent is talking about data recovery, which does fit into the computer forensics forum IMHO.

My main reason for comment is that I take a somewhat broad view of "security", in that I think that it encompasses protection of assets and data, as well as prevention of intrusion, malware and so on. No point in having great firewalls/AV and the like if everything is lost when the HDDs crash?.........and there are no backups.

I actually encountered a situation where a guy was bragging about his new Sun servers and the security that he had.................some guys cut through the chainlink fence that week-end and stole the lot of them .........physically :D

I take the view that running RAID1 or 5 is a data security precaution, so the question is a security one. Similarly, I would take the view that a discussion on redundant power supplies and cooling fans and UPS are security related in the hardware forum.

just my view (and as that is an East Yorkshire view, it counts double, and the golden goal)
:p

hey thanks for the replies. we are talking software raid where backups of the OS on all four drives became corrupted in succesion. not sure why that is though. i think it may be a well rooted virus. i have tried to use knoppix rescue disk on this to no avail. anyone else have any ideas?