Reverse RAID of a RAID

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This technique can be used to re-construct data on individual RAID disks when data on physical disks is corrupted, but can be recovered using RAID redundancy.

Suppose you have a RAID 5 with one missing hard drive and you need to reconstruct data on that disk. You can do that by creating a reverse RAID for it and then copy data from that missing disk to a real one, or to an image.

Note: Many controllers write their own metadata to disks to recognize that the disks belong to certains RAIDs. Without that metadata they won't see those RAIDs. You have to write that metadata manually.

To create a reverse RAID of a RAID with a missing disk,

1Create a virtual RAID 5 of the existing hard drives or their images

Add a missing disk to the Parents tab.

If necessary, read the Basic RAID 4 and RAID 5 Operations and Volumes Sets and RAIDs help pages for details.

2Right-click the Virtual Block Raid on the Drives panel and select Create Reverse RAID on the shortcut menu.
>The Reverse parents will appear on the Drives panel

These parents may be processed as real objects, they can be imaged, viewed/​edited. For your case the missing disk can be copied to a hard drive in the Drive Copy Wizard.

Note: The reverse parents contain the data that should be on the RAID parents, according to its layout, while RAID parents contain actual data, that may be corrupted.