Recover software raid?

[andypress]

Here's the problem. I had an alpha 21264 server with 4 scsi drives that were set up in a software raid. I hadnt used the thing in a while, but I guess the os drive died. I can;t get a copy of NT4 alpha anytime soon. I took the disks out, and need to remount them to recover the data somehow. Ideas?

 

[Nothinman]

If you're not 100% sure the OS drive has died it might be worth it to try and make an image of it, sometimes you can get the drive to cooperate for a while longer as long as it'll spin up. There's also a slim chance that the non-failed drives could be readable on an Intel NT4 machine. I wouldn't put them in a Win2K or XP machine because Windows likes to 'upgrade' any filesystems it mounts to it's current version, but Windows was designed to be cross-platform in the beginning so one would think that NTFS would have had the same design considerations.

If that doesn't work you're probably screwed, there's LDM partition support in Linux but I don't know if it was ever tested with NT4 software RAID sets. If the above fails and Knoppix doesn't see the filesystem, I would just tell the person that owns that box that it's time to move on. NT4 was dead years ago and that Alpha is probably just eBay material at this point. If the data is that important and they don't have backups, it's their own fault.

 

[redbeard1]

I used this program to recover data from a NT4 server using a software mirror. I had to stick the drive in an XP system to run the program, since the server wouldn't boot.

Good luck

Quetek

 

[MadRat]

You're going to have to break the mirror/striped set within Windows to successfully recover software raid. Is there a winPE equivalent disk for an Alpha-compatible NT machine?

edit: Looks like redbeard is on to something. Perhaps you can rebuild the array within a regular windows machine.