[H]ard Drive Guru Needed!

[gte024h]

So one of my ten Samsung HD501LJ drives was making some noise and I figured I would run the Samsung HDUTIL on my drives to verify which one was bad and replace it. Made a floppy, booted up, and ran the test on 9 of the 10 drives, no problems detected. Go to reboot and my RAID is offline... hmm. Did I mention I have a Windows software RAID 5 on these ten drives? I get to looking at the sectors of the drives and the $!&#@! Samgung HDUTIL wrote "1234" in hex across the last few MB of each drive I tested! Turns out that is exactly where Windows keeps the LDM database for dynamic volumes! So the data is still there, but Windows can't see it... the one drive I didn't run the HDUTIL on still as it's LDM intact.

So my question is... IF I copy the LDM (last 1MB of disk) from the one untouched drive over to the other drives, will Windows allow me to reactivate the volume? I know some files may be corrupted or unusable if they happened to get overwritten with "1234", but I can sacrifice a few files to save nearly 4TB of data!

 

[gte024h]

I decided to just try anyways... at least they show up in Disk Management, but it still won't let me activate the volume. I'm trying iRecover now to see if that will work.

 

[gjvrieze]

IIRC, Windows software arrays have a device ID on each drive to identify which member of the array it is, that is why when you copied the one "tag" from the one drive to the others, it did not work, this is very poor of a drive tool... This is why I only use Spin Rite on anything important.....

 

[tmclaugh]

R-Studio is your best friend. It will let you set up a "virtual raid" and allow you to copy off all of the data. If you have a ten disk array you may have some trouble finding an interim medium to copy to.

Good Luck