Data recover from SAS drives that were in RAID 1

I’ve got some old SAS and some SATA drives pulled from working environment that were in hardware RAID 1 and some were in RAID 5 (not concerned about these). Had no issues reading the SATA drives and getting what I needed but the SAS drives are problematic. I’ve tried two different SAS backplanes and two different SAS cards (one in it-mode) as well as on board sata. Looking at fdisk and dmesg on my debian system I’m not seeing the drives show up at all. Now sure where to go from here.

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Depends on how valuable that data is. For starters, make a 1:1 copy of the drive(s) using dd on Linux. Then, find the nearest, best or cheapest (choose one :stuck_out_tongue: ) data recovery service. Pay if the data is valuable enough to warrant the expense. Otherwise, use the copy made to attempt recovery on your own using various recovery tools available on the web like Sysrescuecd (link) or Photorec (link)

No guarantees!

HTH!

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If your SAS drives aren’t detected after trying different backplanes, controllers, and cables, check compatibility between the drives and the controller, and ensure firmware is up to date. Use dmesg, lsblk, and lspci to see if the system recognizes the controller or drives. Drives with RAID metadata may need to be reinitialized with tools like sgdisk. Verify that the drives are getting enough power and test them in a known-working SAS setup. If the problem persists, the drives might be incompatible or defective.

dmesg output? sas drives likely 520 byte. throw them on a cheap controller and import the volume then the raid control will make them show up as 512 byte sector drives and everything is peachy again

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so no way to use a LSI 9207-8i in IT mode to import/mount the drives? I know all of these drives were originally in Dell server using PERC RAID cards.

will get the dmesg output later today.