[geeks] Commiserate with me ... this sucks.

[Gregory Leblanc]

On Fri, 2004-07-02 at 11:23, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> On Fri, 2 Jul 2004, mrl wrote:
> 
> >> I have actually had a RAID controller fail, and used Software RAID under
> >> Linux to reconstruct the RAID array.
> >
> > You can do that? I didn't realize... I thought that if you used a
> > hardware RAID controller, if that controller ever died, you *had* to use
> > the same controller unless you want to reformat your disks.
> 
> He said RAID 1, which is just mirroring of the two physical devices into
> one metadevice.  There's no black magic there.

Actually, I've done it with RAID 5 too.  I haven't ever tried RAID 0,
but if you had enough information, you could probably do that as well. 
For RAID 5, you need to know the parity algorithm used, and the stripe
size.  With that, you can configure Linux to start up the RAID array,
and get back at your data.  It's not one of those operations that you
expect to just blow through and have everything work, but if you're
meticulous, you can get it working just fine.
	Greg