Tool to help recover from a broken RAID5
I came upon the need to attempt data recovery on a broken Raid5 array. Long story short, my client had a server with no backup at a data center. At the DC, an electrician was working on the breakers, to which our clients rack is connected, and took down power multiple times, probably a slew of surges too! :-@ That’s another story. I did not have any commercial tools that would reconstruct a set of RAID5 images, so off I went a Googling. What I found was an interesting solution created by Edmundo Carmona and can be found at Free Software Magazine. I’m not going to go into details here, but it worked pretty well, although we could not get any data recovered, as the drives seemed to have been totally hosed by the power issues. We eventually did try commercial tools, which yielded the same results. Anyway, some may find tool useful, but I hope you don’t have a need for this.