TL;DR?
I'm trying to get data off some old hard drives that were RAID'd on a Promise FastTrak 100 Lite controller. The controller hardware is no more as the motherboard it is on is dead, but the IDE drives are working well enough that images are being taken.
Any ideas on how the striped data can be rebuilt?
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A long time ago, as an enthusiast into gaming, home building PCs, running totally inappropriate software otherwise, I built a monstrosity of a machine. It was my home's Windows 2000 (yes, it was that long ago) domain controller. You didn't do that? A simple domain makes Windows networking so smooth compared to that workgroup tedium!
Anyway, from spares and budget kit I built an AMD Duron ~800MHz based machine, on a Gigabyte GA-7DXR, 768 meg of RAM, running a pirate copy of Windows 2000 Data Centre Server. The fattest and stupidly over-spec OS available. DCS had a software RAID feature, and I used it as the piece-de-la-resistance of my house-of-cards. The hostname was bloat.
The hard drives were:
OS on an 8.4gig maxtor, on mobo's standard IDE controller.
2x 80gig on Fasttrak 100 Lite
2x 120gig on Fasttrak 100 Lite
I cannot remember which, but one of the pairs was RAID0 striped and presented to the OS as a single drive. The FastTrak 100 Lite would only do one array (the "Lite" bit), even though it could support 4 IDE drives, meaning the other pair were just presented to the OS as (I think) 2 standard IDE drives.
Armed with either (2 x 80gig and 1 x 240gig) or (2 x 120gig and 1 x 160gig), I consolidated this using Windows' software RAID.
Ahh, that feels better now it is out. I've been living with that shame for a decade!
To clarify, that was RAID on RAID. RAID0 where possible, I wasn't doing things by halves (OK, literally I was, with things being split in equal chunks, but I digress...).
Windows 2000 was the best version of Windows, for me. It was NT stable in a 9x world, did all the games (pretty much), and pretty much every UI silliness could be tamed. With XP the most glaring symptom of what irked me was the Fisher Price UI, but by then I had had enough of the world of proprietary software. It was the start of my radicalisation by the internet (is that safe to admit?). I had dabbled with Linux since Corel Linux, whenever that was. But I use FOSS pretty much exclusively these days, and love the control the user can have. If they know what they are doing. As this is a support forum, I wouldn't be here otherwise, I'm struggling to control a likely unmanageable situation.
Linux is great, as are modern HDDs with their capacity. My NAS is accommodating these files, no probs. The 4 large (ha!) HDDs from bloat are being imaged like this example:
ddrescue /dev/sdb Maxtor80master.img
It would be wonderful if someone has already cobbled together something that will go through two images, stripe-width at a time, and output into another file. Allowing for any offset at the start. I hope that is how simple the RAID0 is when actually placed on the disk?
The disk IDs on the two 120gig drives are sequential, so that makes me think those are the striped ones. An IDE to USB bridge is getting the data off the first 80 gig drive now, only 2 error out of ddrescue so far.
This is what's in the images/on the drives. I am sure one drive was dying 12 years ago when these disks were last on, so getting an image is all I am trying for.
$ fdisk -lu Maxtor120_1.img
Disk Maxtor120_1.img: 122.9 GB, 122942324736 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 14946 cylinders, total 240121728 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x91d0e93e
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
Maxtor120_1.img1 63 240107489 120053713+ 42 SFS
SFS seems to be an Amiga filesystem, but I guess the Promise set the partition type to a value deemed rare or non-existent? How both 120s and one 80 (last one not imaged yet) have this SFS file system makes me think either the contents of the drives are only really available via Promise hardware, or Windows RAID thing is showing through. Maybe MS don't use the standard NTFS/HPFS partition type?
Ultimately, if I can consolidate the drive images correctly into a huge image, I can use Windows 2000 DCS (or possibly a higher version of plain server) in a virtual machine to access the Windows software RAID partition. Then the data can be taken off onto something more solid (floppy disk, for example!).
Sorry for such a long post, if anyone has any sarcastic remarks to make about this farce, please go for it. Any bright ideas would be appreciated too, though.
