I had a Mac Pro (Mid-2010 I think?) with a RAID card which I used to RAID5 4 internal 2TB hard drives. I sold off the Mac Pro around 6 months ago, but kept the hard drives. I now wish to access the data on them so was wondering if anyone knew the best way to do this. I bought a DataTale 4-bay RAID enclosure, but am not sure how to get it to "see" the existing RAID5 setup. If there is a better enclosure/different method, I can return it and try something different. Any suggestions?
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Moving Mac Pro RAID hard drives to external enclosure
- Thread starter tolmasky
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Buy a Mac Pro with the same RAID card, and connect the drives to it (in the same order as before).
There's no standard for data layout on the drives in a hardware RAID setup - only the same (or similar) controller will be able to understand the data layout.
I'm pretty certain you can't move RAID5 arrays. To access that data you will need to connect it (as before) to the original controller, which means you'll need to borrow a Mac Pro (with that same controller assuming you sold that as well).
This is your only option for accessing the array directly. You could also gain access to the data you need from the array by getting the data from the data backup of the RAID array. You do backup your data don't you?
Agree with last two posts. Trying random RAID cards/enclosure WILL end up destroying the data on the drives.
You could use something like R-Studio to manually rebuild the RAID and access the data. It's not easy, but is the safest (and only good) option if you can't get the original card back (or if you didn't write the order of the drives down to make sure they go back in the Mac Pro where they were before).
You could use something like R-Studio to manually rebuild the RAID and access the data. It's not easy, but is the safest (and only good) option if you can't get the original card back (or if you didn't write the order of the drives down to make sure they go back in the Mac Pro where they were before).
If you use a tool that can do a hex dump of the raw devices, you should be able to figure out the drive order. It helps to know the chunk size.
The beginning of the drive usually has fixed meta-data. You might be able to recognize that in the hex dump. If RAID-5, the drive with "gibberish" is the XOR chunk.
I recovered about 20 TB of data from some arrays that had completely corrupted meta-data, but the actual data was OK. I had to create an identical volume, then offline use "dd" to copy the data partitions from the corrupted drives into the partitions on the new volume. When I put the new volume online - my data was back!