Hardware & Field
RAID-0 recovery
214,000+ files from a pair of junk disks.
Problem
A pair of Windows disks pulled from a dead machine, previously run as a RAID-0 stripe. No controller to read them, and RAID-0 keeps no standard on-disk metadata once that controller is gone. Guess the stripe parameters wrong and every file is noise. The disks were junk; the data on them was not.
Diagnosis
RAID-0 interleaves data across both disks in fixed-size chunks. To reassemble it in software I needed three things right: chunk size, disk order and starting offset. Get any of them wrong and every file corrupts. My plan: probe candidate parameters, reassemble with the Linux device mapper, mount read-only, and prove the filesystem parses before recovering a single file.
Action
- Reassembled the stripe pair in Linux with
dmsetup striped, probing chunk size, disk order and offset until the filesystem structure parsed - Mounted read-only. The originals never change
- Ran a full recovery pass with Sleuth Kit's
tsk_recover: 214,311 files - Ran a targeted pass through the NTFS master file table for what mattered most: 157 photos, 1,555 audio files and a pile of Android development data
Outcome
- 214,000+ files recovered from a stripe set with no working controller
- 157 real photos, 1,555 audio files, and a pile of development data rescued from what was nearly a wipe
- A repeatable method: probe, reassemble, verify, recover, and never write to the source disks
What I'd do differently
Pending
Reflection to be written by Jupiter.
0
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The environment
About this desktop
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Toolchest
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Desks
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Customise
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Screen saver
Thirteen effects named after the IRIX screen savers, with a timeout, a Random mode and an optional lock. Open the Screen Saver window to change them.
Desks
Four desks, as 4Dwm kept them. Each surface belongs to the desk it was opened on — switch with the status strip, the Toolchest, or Ctrl+Alt+1…4.
Winterm
Type help for the commands — ls, open,theme, date.
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Background
Bevels
Screen saver
The timeout, the effect and the lock live in the Screen Saver window.