[kwlug-disc] Assembling hardware RAID in mdadm

[Digimer]

On 2019-10-03 1:45 p.m., Paul Nijjar via kwlug-disc wrote:
> I have a bad feeling I know the answer to this, but I wanted to
> confirm my feelings.
> 
> I am working with somebody who has a hardware RAID enclosure (a
> Promise Pegasus2, which I think has some proprietary non-mdadm RAID
> controller). I am looking at trying to recover data from that array.
> The drives are good but have bad blocks. I used ddrescue to get images
> of each of those drives. 
> 
> For assorted paranoid reasons I don't want to touch the original
> enclosure or the original drives too much. I am thinking that maybe I
> could stick the cloned drives into a Linux box and then try to
> reassemble them using mdadm. 
> 
> My guess is that different hardware/software RAID solutions are not
> compatible with each other, but I am not sure. Does anybody have
> experience with trying this? Does it ever work?
> 
> - Paul

99.999% sure that won't work.

What you could do, though, is write the images you took to spare hard
drives of equal or greater size, and put those onto the controller. That
should allow the controller to detect the array and reform it. (Note,
I've never used Promise controllers, so there's some amount of
assumptions here).

-- 
Digimer
Papers and Projects: https://alteeve.com/w/
"I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of
Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent
have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." - Stephen Jay Gould