Recover array disk configuration

[Hector Lizarraga]

Please help!!! I have an old NetServer LX Pro server with 6 hot swap disks in an array as following:

1 A0-0 4GB
2 A1-0 4GB
3 A1-1 4GB
4 A2-0 9GB
5 A3-0 9GB
6 A3-1 9GB

The firsts three logical drives are OK and NT recognizes them, but in the NT disk manager the fourth
logical drive appears as if it have no partition!

I had to recreate the array in the NetRaid utility and after I did this the fourth array is lost! all I see from this array now is blank space. Altough I know there are data in the disks.

How can I recover the array configuration. I already know that the array configuration is held in the disks itself. I think the info in this array is corrupted, How can I recover it?

thanks in advance

[kris rombauts]

Hello Hector,

you did not explained how you initially ran into this situation of having to re-create the last logical drive. What made you to decide to do this then, was it the same fact that you had no partition in disk manager or something else at the hardware level that went wrong ? (i.e. Netraid card or disk problems ?).

The only thing i can think of is that the logical drive that was re-created was not re-created with the exact same parameters and hence the stripe layout is different and the OS has problems reading the partition table.
After re-creating obviously you should not initialize the re-created array or all data is lost, just skip the initialize step and answer NO.


Are you sure the same parameters were used ?
If the answer to this question is yes, then you have to look into corruption at the file system level and use recover techniques or utilities for NTFS.
Check back in your system log to see when their was an error logged related to file the file system i.e.

You asked how to recover the array config, it is kept in both the Netraid controller and on each disk but since you already recreated the array this original information is now modified and as such it is lost unless you saved a copy of the array configuration before using the utilities on the Navigator cd file and restore this now.

Since the data on this last array is not accessible now, you can 'trial and error' now by recreating the last array and using other parameters that hopefully are the right ones and each time check if you can access them in disk administrator.
Look at things like stripe size i.e.


Kris