Any chance of an ISO with a wider selection of tools for RAID recovery in it?

[tstaddon]

Hi,

I'm a bit rusty with Linux so please bear with me...

I have 2 matching disks from a RAID0 array that for some reason Intel RST has lost the config for. None of the supplied apps seem to have a clue what to do with those disks. Trial apps on Windows do see that they're a RAID pair and even let me see the file system but the problem with Windows is it's way too clever - if I try to RECOVER the data, all the other gubbins that's in the operating system trying to monitor the drives and whatnot gets in the way, and the system just hangs.

I've tried a whole bunch of different ISOs with different tools over the course of two weeks and am yet to find one that (a) has all the tools in it that I actually need baked in from the start and (b) boots up with the disks I need to troubleshoot NOT MOUNTED.

REDORESCUE does most of that, and I can use DISKS, GPARTED and REDO... but only with a non-RAID disk.

If I want to create an image of either disk from the RAID array before attempting recovery, I have to go into the console to type in a bunch of commands to mount it before I can use it in DISKS. Then, DISKS will then let me attempt to create an image but it can only do so via a sector-by-sector backup because it has no idea what the filesystem is. At the speed it's working when doing it THAT way, it'll take weeks of continuous reading just to convert one disk to an image, let alone two. For all I know, the disks could be unrecoverable by the time it's finished.

A more sensible option might be to get Linux to create a virtual RAID array, stick both drives in it, and THEN I can try using DISKS/GPARTED/REDO.

I tried MDADM (which does load in other Linux distros) but I cannot get it to install here. It gets as far as trying to create the conf file before falling over. There are other toools, like HDDSuperTool, DMDE, TestDisk, PhotoRec, and ddrescue that I could try, but again they're not baked into the build and getting them installed is PAINFUL.