Hi Folks, sorry about the confusion when it comes to EMC drives.  I have gone to my sources and found that Jared is correct in that these SATA drives cannot be reformatted at 520.  It does indeed use the raw 512 format. The AX4-5 system software converts to 520 on the fly. The drive assembly is therefore labeled as 520 for use with our arrays.....but the raw drive itself is at 512.       Additionally the back-end on an AX4-5 is SAS so EMC uses the raw SATA drive and couples it with a SAS bridge card to create a SAS drive assembly. Hope this helps!  Dan
I work at a data recovery company (www.data-medics.com) and was recently contacted regarding recovering data from a failed EMC Clariion AX4-5i unit.  Here's the situation:  The OS drives are still in a healthy working array.  The data portion was configured in a RAID 6 with 8 500GB SATA drives.  One drive went offline and went unnoticed for a long time.  A second drive went offline (and was noticed), then during the rebuild, a third drive went down.  The latter two drives to go offline were both just affected by bad sectors and were imaged with only a few KB of unread sectors.  So we have more than enough disks to go online.  So here's my questions: 1. Is there a way to force the data array back online using the disks?  Even changing serial numbers of the clones isn't a problem, we're a professional data recovery lab and can do that in a few minutes.  But, I assume some metadata needs to be modified to un-mark the members from being "failed". 2. We can virtually build the array, however it doesn't appear there's any known file system on there.  I assume it's EMC's proprietary FLARE filesystem.  Is there any way that we can extract files that way, assuming that we can destripe the data from the array to a single image file? 3. Is there even a file system on the data array, or is it all on the OS part of the unit?  We deal with a ton of RAID arrays, but these EMC units are pretty foreign to us.  Thanks a million in advance for any guidance you can provide here.
Force Failed RAID Back Online