Can SpinRite Be Used to Recover Data from a Corrupted RAID Array?

[AbeSwift]

Hello everyone,

I have a RAID 1 array that’s showing some signs of corruption, and I’m wondering if SpinRite can help recover data from this type of setup. Has anyone successfully used SpinRite on RAID drives? What’s the best approach to make sure I don’t further damage the array while trying to recover the data?
Because i am a professional concreter and the founder of: www.concretesrichmondva.com

 

[PHolder]

SpinRite does NOT provide any comprehension of the file system, or redundancy arrangement (RAID or otherwise.) It sounds like the problem you're having may be just filesystem related, in which case SpinRite will be of no use to you. If, however, the problem is some failure of the underlying drives, then read on..

All SpinRite does is make the drive exercise its physics in an attempt to force it to find and read data it is having an otherwise difficult time doing. (In essence it's exceedingly stubborn at requesting the drive to retry a failed read in hopes that the mechanics (of spinning rust drives) will eventually align better and recovery can occur.)

So, in your case, here's what you could try, but beware. You would need to temporarily decommission the RAID so that SpinRite could access the drive. (This poses the first potential danger, if it's software RAID or you need to make BIOS changes to do this.) It would probably be better to extract the drive for physical access in another system that doesn't know or care about RAIDs. In this case, each drive can be scanned separately, and SpinRite will exercise it to see if it can be coerced into eventually reading the data one more time. One of two results will accrue. 1. The data will be recovered, and it will be rewritten back in place or 2. the data will not be recovered, and the missing data will be zeroed and the zeroes will overwrite the error LBA.

The reason why I said beware is because you would want to know what your RAID will do in the case of #2 above. Because that will result in a desynchronization of the RAID it could potentially fatally break it. Because RAID 1 is a mirror arrangement, you theoretically could use the RAID software or firmware to break the RAID and try accessing each drive as an individual. (Not all systems would allow this operation, but you may have little to lose.)

 

[ColbyBouma]

You should probably make an image of each drive first, in case something goes wrong. Macrium, Clonezilla, etc.

 

[f1assistance]

Hello everyone,

I have a RAID 1 array that’s showing some signs of corruption, and I’m wondering if SpinRite can help recover data from this type of setup. Has anyone successfully used SpinRite on RAID drives? What’s the best approach to make sure I don’t further damage the array while trying to recover the data?

Thanks!

Can you describe what "signs of corruption" look like to you?
RAID 1 is mirrored drives? Which of the 2 drives is having troubles?
Question for the forum: Might someone run Spinrite on a troubled RAID 1 drive in another machine and then once corrected, returned it to the original machine and rebuild the RAID?