BLU's server crash and data recovery

[Jerry Feldman]

Tom Metro wrote:
> Bill Bogstad wrote:
>> Look up ddrescue.  It's a variant of dd which tries hard to skip over
>> bad blocks in order to recover every possible block of data it can.
>
> ddrescue has been mentioned on the list before.
>
> Supposedly Spinrite talks to the IDE controller on the drive and
> disables the internal retries and error correction, so it can access
> the raw data and fully control the recovery process. I'd be curious to
> know if ddrescue tries to do that.
>
>
> Ben Eisenbraun wrote:
>> ...it looks like the data is on a RAID volume built with a hardware
>> RAID controller...I don't think running dd on the individual disks
>> connected to a standard SCSI controller is going to give you anything
>> of value.
>
> A dd copy of the underlying disk in a RAID set won't be of much use on
> its own, but it provides a fallback in case other recovery attempts on
> the disks fail. You can restore the dd images to new drives (or
> directly mount them through a loopback device) and attempt to put them
> back into the RAID set.
>
>
> Jerry Feldman wrote:
>> ...I will download and pay for Spinrite. It's
>> worth it to spend $90 of BLUs money to try the recovery.
>
> Did you notice whether Spinrite said it supported SCSI drives?
>
> Spinrite might be useful to have for BLU installfests. Some people use
> it to quality check new drives before installing an OS.
Spinrite definitely does SCSI.

I now have 2 disk copies and 2 image copies of the data.
We do plan on buying spinrite.

As far as I can determine, the disks do not exhibit I/O errors. But I
have some questions:
1. We had 3 disks in the Dell, 2 disks have partition tables that look
somewhat normal, and the third drive has no partition table. It is
possible that the raid5 controller was using this drive, or did the
person who set the system up in the first place simply did not partition
the drive.

2. Assuming I still cannot boot those drives in any of the existing
Dells, does anyone know if it is possible to recover the data. Again,
assuming the data is in tact in the images. And, can it be done
inexpensively since the BLU treasury does not have very much cash.