Restoring RAID-5 on a different computer without Intel's RST controller

AlexeyEgorov · ‎11-11-2022

It seems that my computer's motherboard has died and I am considering retiring the whole server. For that I need to restore my RAID-5 (4 SATA disks). Ideally, I'd use an enclosure which is able to recognize Intel's RAID, or a software that would work with USB connected drives. Is it possible and easy to do?

I still have a cloud backup of the RAID disk, but thought that restoring the RAID would be faster.

Thanks.

Jean_Intel · ‎11-14-2022

Hello AlexeyEgorov,

Thank you for posting on the Intel️® communities.

We understand you have opened an email support case with us, and we will continue to help you through that channel now. We will therefore close this community case. Please, keep in mind that this thread will no longer be monitored by Intel.

Thanks for your understanding.

Best regards

Jean O.

Intel Customer Support Technician

isleshocky77 · ‎12-01-2022

@AlexeyEgorov I'm going through the exact same thing right now.

I found this blog entry which is exactly your situation.

https://blog.bramp.net/post/2021/09/12/recovering-a-raid-5-intel-storage-matrix-on-linux-without-the-hardware/

It's been _super_ close for me; however, in his example he was restoring a RAID 5 set of disks and was unable to get one disk to load which was fine.

I'm attempting to restore RAID 0 and also have 1 disk marked as failed which means it won't work.

I believe the disk that failed for him and the disk that is failing for me are the same situation which I'm currently attempting to solve. The failed disk is the one with the boot record on it. Let me know if something similar happens for you.

P.s. I've documented by trials so far here: https://gist.github.com/isleshocky77/4b7d48b712dd0638d75d5757f36bdec3

AlexeyEgorov · ‎12-02-2022

Thanks for your reply. I actually ended up setting up a completely new standalone NAS (Synology DS920+) and restoring 10TB of data from Backblaze. It was not fun, but at least it was not as mindboggling as what you are trying to do! Good luck with your data restoration.

As to me, I seem to be happy with my new NAS.